Microsoft SQL Server 2016 – A Beginners Guide

ISBN: 978-1-25-964179-4
By Dusan Petkovic
McGraw Hill Education
$45.00 USD
CodeProject
I bought this book because I wanted a definitive, hard copy reference that covers the basics of SQL Server administration, performance tuning, replication, and of course, T-SQL.

I was hoping the author would tap into his real world experience to offer insight into the unexpected gotchas that complicate database development in Transact-SQL.  I also wanted to learn more about how certain functionality is commonly used (or not used) in the real world.  Instead..

Inaccurate

This book has some puzzling omissions that make it unreliable as a desk reference, in my view.  The one below is from page 86, which states that CHARINDEX accepts only two parameters when it actually accepts three.

Then on page 87, QUOTENAME is documented as accepting one parameter, when it accepts two.

Incomplete

The book’s author, Dusan Petkovic, is a lifelong academic, which might be why he made no mention of cursors in this book. Sure, replacing cursors with WHILE loops or other constructs can result in less locking/blocking and massive performance boosts.  That’s why some groups don’t use cursors at all, but WHILE loops can be harder to read and understand and so there are other groups that use cursors regularly.

In fact, I discovered this shortfall while examining stored procedures that have been used in our production environment at work for almost a decade.   To me, a book about the basics of SQL Server is incomplete if it doesn’t mention one of the data types it supports.

Summary

In my humble opinion, this book provides little value beyond Microsoft’s free Books Online (BOL).  While, my copy is a little beat up from flipping through it on the treadmill at the gym, it’s not my go-to reference.