Microsoft SQL Server 2000 High Availability

Author: Allan Hirt, Cathan Cook, Kimberley Tripp, Microsoft Corporation, Frank McBath List Price: $49.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0735619204 Publisher: Microsoft Press (01 July, 2003) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 85,214 Average Customer Rating: 2.75 out of 5

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Customer Reviews

This book was right on track and the cluster and log ship info just isn't anywhere else. I agree replication was light, but who runs repl for availability anyway? The book put some humor into a grim subject, so it comes across not so serious, but at least it wasn't boring or a reprint of books online. The last chapter had monitoring info you can't get anywhere else, and it was worth the price of the book. Take a look at the cd, there's some kick-A stuff on it, like what looks like another chapter on performance issues effecting uptime.

What some of you guys write here and in thse newsgroups just proves that Bill's worse problems are not in his software. If you're serious about software, you keep up with it. If Microsoft saw some use in trying to get the word out by printing a late book on sql and getting some big name writers to do it, then I'm reading it. Are you going to ignore it because of some guy off the internet? Remember we're talking availability here, so its not the million dollar question.

I'm giving the book four stars. It skimmed over some things it should of covered (like performance, operations, qa testing, handling heterogenous systems, and some other stuff) and it should be a series of books, not just one huge one. It wouldn't hurt if they could referenced non-microsoft books for some subjects that aren't software. Plus it should have more on running high availability systems without clustering or fancy hardware. Only some databases that have to be up all the time run on Enterprise Edition. But everyone will blame Bill if their system is down. Don't they know that by now?

cluster chapter
hardware coverage
Windows Server 2003 tidbits

I didn't like other things:

replication coverage - way to short to be useful. Doesn't tell much about high availability in relation to replicaton.

bad advice - several things they recommend even I know better than to do. I got to the point where I started ingoring the recommendations and just hunted for facts to help me form my own conclusions.

performance stuff -- its to weak and not discussed as much as it should be. I think you need to really go into performance issues when you talk about high availability because poor performance makes a system less available.

I guess the final word is that this is a decent book that you might want to get if SQL SERVER high availability is something you need to know about. Just don't expect a great book.

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