SQL Server Books I Recommend

Video Summary

In this video, I delve into my extensive collection of SQL Server books, sharing insights and recommendations based on years of experience in the field. From the foundational works like Ken Henderson’s “The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Architecture” and “Gone But Not Forgotten,” which provide a deep dive into core concepts and are surprisingly relevant even today, to more recent titles such as Itzik Ben-Gan’s “T-SQL Fundamentals” and Louis Davidson’s “Pro-SQL Server Relational Database Design and Implementation,” I cover a wide range of topics that will benefit both beginners and seasoned professionals. Each book offers unique perspectives and practical knowledge, contributing incrementally to one’s understanding of SQL Server. Whether you’re looking for fundamental architecture insights or advanced troubleshooting techniques, there’s something in this collection for everyone.

Full Transcript

Erik Darling here with Darling Data. In today’s video, because I have gotten no fewer than like 10,000 questions on my office hours thing about SQL Server books or database books, we’re going to talk through my stack of books. And I have even put together a website, a page on my website that lists all of the books that I recommend. They are, of course, Amazon affiliate links because I spent 10 minutes putting together this list. And I figure over the span of time, the 53 cents that I’ll make from you people clicking these links and maybe buying things will be adequate compensation for my effort there. So let’s talk about books. The first one, and this is a granddaddy book. This is The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Architecture and Internals by Ken Henderson by Ken Henderson. This is by Ken Henderson, who’s dead. So RIP Ken. This one has a CD-ROM in it that is unopened, which I’m pretty psyched about. I did have to get a lot of these books second-hand. And I think one of my favorite things about buying second-hand books is the weird stuff that you find in them. I bought one sort of recently, unrelated to SQL Server, that had like a laminated, like kids-made bookmark, that said, like, Happy Father’s Day 2008. And my wife found it and she got kind of freaked out, but it was all explained. Anyway, this is a very good book. Old, but well worth it because you learn a lot from this stuff. This fills in a lot of fundamental knowledge stuff that a lot of people are missing.

We’re going to stick with Ken Henderson for a couple more here because Gone But Not Forgotten and certainly Not Gone Without Leaving is his mark on the world. We have the Guru’s Guide to Transact SQL, which covers many great and interesting T-SQL concepts and conventions. Granted, this is, again, old, but very useful. The one thing that is not in here, aside from a CD-ROM which is missing, is anything about API cursors, which I recently had some fun with and I will probably do a video about because, you know, that’s what I do. I have fun with things and I make videos about them for you. The third and final Ken Henderson book, which also has an unopened CD-ROM in it, is the Guru’s, well, sorry, there’s a sticker over there.

The Guru’s Guide to SQL Server, the Guru’s Guide to SQL Server, Store Procedures, XML and HTML. Granted, I would probably not recommend doing much HTML with SQL Server, but XML still around to this day. This of course predates JSON, so we can’t really go into detail on that. But everything else in there is absolutely wonderful. Moving on now from the Ken Henderson wing of my library into the, well, actually, no. This is, this is, there’s one more from Ken Henderson before we move on to other ones. SQL Server 2005 Practical Troubleshooting.

Well, sorry, this is edited by Ken Henderson. Who is the author on this? This might have like 17 authors. I don’t know. Let’s see. Let’s open this up. Edited by Ken Henderson. Let’s see what we got here. We got a table of contents. This is going to go on for a while. About the authors. All right. Okay, cool. Well, let me, there are, there are a number of notable people in here. Some of them I haven’t heard of, but we have August Hill.

We have Cesar Galindo Ligari, who is still on the SQL Server Optimizer team. Very smart fella. Ken Henderson, of course. Samir Tajani. Santeri. Oh boy. Vudelenin. Slava Ox. Hey, my pal Slava Ox. Wee Zhao. Bart Duncan. Great SQL Server blogger from back in the day. And of course, Bob Ward from back when he was in, it’s going to be hard for me to show you this, but actually, yeah, that’s not working out well at all.

But this is Bob Ward when he was still in Microsoft Customer Support Services. And Cindy Gross is the final one noted here. So that, that, this is a collection of authors. So edited by Ken Henderson. Sort of a slightly weird thing there. Anyway, now we’re going to move on to the Kaylin Delaney et al. wing of my library. We’re going to start off with Inside SQL Server 2005 Query Tuning and Optimization. Now I know what you’re going to say. Query tuning in 2005 is totally different than it was today. It’s not. A lot of the same stuff still applies. We just have some new tools and some new techniques, but there is a lot of fantastic information in here for folks who need to learn fundamentals and who need to maybe see just how similar and just how consistent the concepts in database query tuning and optimization are.

This one is maybe not so important to query tuning, but it is, it is a cool book. This is Microsoft Inside the Storage Engine for SQL Server 2005. Now I know that the storage engine has had many changes and many things added to it and stuff like that, but there is still a lot of very good foundational knowledge in this book. Next up, we have Microsoft SQL Server 2008 internals. Internals knowledge, very good stuff to have. Even in 2008, there’s good stuff to learn in here. One thing that you’re going to find across all of these books is that you’re going to pick up something new in all of them, right? I don’t mean new in like, oh, this is like, like, obviously we’re up to SQL Server 2022. There have been whispers of SQL Server 2025 already. But one thing that you’re going to get across all of these is incremental. There’s going to be some stuff in some books that you might not see in the other books.

There’s going to be some of these books that you might not see in the other books. And there’s going to be a knowledge accumulation for you as you go across your learning journey. And then this is probably the last of the great SQL Server internals books, SQL Server 2012 internals. So the 2008 book was, had contributors, Paul S. Randall, Kimberly L. Tripp, Connor Cunningham, Adam Mechanic. All right, a lot of good stuff there.

And this one here, we have, we still have Connor Cunningham. We got John Cahias. We got Paul Randall. We got Bob Beauchemin. We got all sorts of smart people contributing to these books. Now, we’re going to move on to the Itzik Ben-Gan wing of my library.

And we are going to see T-SQL Fundamentals. This is the fourth edition. Itzik, before he went into semi-retired hermit phase, did update this. This is the latest edition of that. Continuing on with the Itzik wing of my library, we have T-SQL Querying.

Thick book, good book. I’ve had this one since, oh, it came out in about 20, what was it, 2015, I think, 20, somewhere there. This one is Itzik, Dajan Sarka, Smartfella, Adam Mechanic, Kevin Farley. Kevin Farley, who recently retired from Microsoft. Good for him.

Next up, a slightly more recent book. We have Pro-SQL Server Relational Database Design and Implementation by Louis Davidson. Louis was kind enough to have me on the Redgate Simple Talks podcast recently.

If you haven’t listened to that podcast generally, or at least my episode, I can highly recommend you go do that. And the final book that I have here is by a fella named Dimitri Karatkevich, SQL Server Advanced Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning. I do like this book quite a bit. There was actually even something in here that he discussed.

I forget exactly what it was at this point. There was something with the DMV query that I thought was cool. I actually realized that I didn’t have that in SP pressure detector, so I added it in. I think I even have his name in the pull request for it, but I forget a little bit.

But anyway, this is a very good book. And I think one of the things that I liked best about this book is, you know, a lot of the times that I’m reading something, I have, like, the stuff that I would think and say when I’m talking about something.

And, like, he would be, like, talking about a topic, and it would, like, you know, like, he’d, like, you know, make a point about something. And then I’d be like, yeah, but, like, this other thing that you have to take into account with it. And then the next sentence would be like, but of course you must consider.

And I was like, yes, this is a very good book. So if you are a bookish person, those are the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 books about SQL Server that I generally recommend. There are a couple notable books that are not on this list because they are not about SQL Server specifically that are also good.

They are Database Reliability Engineering and Designing Data Intensive Applications. But you can get all of, you can get the full list with Amazon links to purchase these books on my website. That’s going to be erikdarling.com slash books.

I will have the link to my site in the video description here. And you can go buy them and you can go learn from them. And maybe, since you’re most likely buying used books, maybe you can find some cool artifacts from the sands of time in there.

But anyway, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope you learned something.

And I hope that you will go buy some books if that is your preferred vehicle for learning about things. So anyway, thank you for watching.

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