Rating: 
Summary: Packed with info you can't find elsewhere
Review: This book is a must-have for DBAs or developers who want an inside view of SQL Server's architecture. It contains very little content duplicated from Books Online and delves much deeper than the majority of SQL Server books available. Delaney shows everything from how data is actually stored on disc to the internals of the query optimizer. I find her writing style to be smooth and easy to digest, and I had no problem reading this book cover-to-cover. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Must-have info
Review: This book is packed with vital information for SQL Server developers. Much of the information here is available nowhere else -- and much of the rest of it can be found only by exhaustive searches through Microsoft archives. In addition, some of the material -- the section on locking comes first to mind -- is explained better in this book than anywhere else I've seen (and I have a wide shelf of SQL Server books. Perhaps the book can be criticized because it doesn't try to cover every last feature in the product. But it could not, at least not in the depth that Delaney digs into the topics she does address. And the topics she covers are at the core of getting good performance from SQL Server and are crucial for writing high-performance applications. There are many books on the market that cover the whole product superficially -- this isn't one of those books, thankfully. Perhaps in the next edition, less space could be devoted to the TSQL language (many other books cover this well) and used to broaden the coverage in other areas -- but that's a minor quibble. If you are a SQL Server developer and are only going to buy one book on SQL Server, this should be it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book.
Review: This is a must have book for any serious SQL Server programmer.
I was amazed by the level of details that the book covers. It is the BIBLE of Microsoft SQL Server 2000. From the architectural viewpoint, there no way to compare this book with any other in the market. It shows you the implementation as well as the programming details of Microsoft SQL Server. If you are serious about knowing SQL Server inns & outs. Get this great book. I enjoyed every paragraph and page along the way.
Rating: 
Summary: Very good book
Review: We recently moved from Informix to Sql 2K and found this book very useful. Thanks to this and Henderson's book we were able to make the migration in 6 months. We actually unplugged the Informix server yesterday. This book teaches how Sql works inside. The product docs don't even tell half the story, so a book like this can help fill in the gaps.
Rating:
Summary: Very good book
Review: We recently moved from Informix to Sql 2K and found this book very useful. Thanks to this and Henderson's book we were able to make the migration in 6 months. We actually unplugged the Informix server yesterday. This book teaches how Sql works inside. The product docs don't even tell half the story, so a book like this can help fill in the gaps.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely useful and a pleasure to read.
Review: What I love about this book is that it really shows you the full story of SQL Server, starting with a broad history of the product, and eventually delving down into the deep internals of the system.
I recently had to to deal with an old Sybase database, and found this book helpful, because Kalen's discussion of the internal storage and retrieval of data really applies across many database technologies. And of course, it has also proven invaluable for working with SQL Server too!
This book is directed to people who want to know what SQL Server can do and how to use it. No marketing hype here, just good solid material.
The only downside is the index, which for MS Press books, is in a too-large text, does not indent things well, and does not always group things in the most useful fashion. But this is not a fault of the author, and does not lessen the greateness of this book.
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