A First Look at SQL Server 2005 for Developers By: Bob Beauchemin, Niels Berglund, and Dan Sullivan Publisher: Addison-Wesley

Review by Andrew Novick  December 2, 2004

There’s a lot for developers to learn about SQL Server 2005, formerly known as Yukon.  A First Look at SQL Server for Developers is a good way to get started.  I found it worthwhile even without trying out most of the features of SQL Server 2005 in the beta.  But don't dally, the book is quickly becoming obsolete as new betas change some of the details of SQL Server 2005's implementation.

The book covers almost everything a developer needs to understand in SQL Server 2005 with several notable exceptions:

• Reporting Services
• Analysis Services
• DTS

All of them are really developer topics but they didn’t seem to make the cut.  Also omitted are features primarily used by the DBA, such as changes in replication and in the SQL Server tools.

The authors devote a moderate amount of attention to some changes in T-SQL but the bulk of the book is devoted to the topics of most interest to developers such programming of stored procedures and user-defined functions with the .Net CLR and changes in ADO.Net 2.0.  There’s plenty of space devoted to XML as well.  After that there are chapters devoted to ObjectSpaces, the new Service Broker, and to Notification Services. 

All the CLR examples are in C# but that won’t bother most VB.Net programmers.  The language doesn’t matter much.  The examples are kept purposely very simple so that space can be devoted to isolating exactly what’s different between SQL Server 2005 and earlier versions and showing just what the SQL Server features are without going into any details about programming in .Net languages.  For those not familiar with .Net there’s an appendix that gives a short summary.

The team that did the proofreading didn’t pay enough attention to detail.  There are numerous typos and small errors in the book.  They don’t really detract from it’s purpose but I found them annoying.

There's an appropriate amount of attention devoted to "best practices".  I say appropriate because the authors gave their ideas about what constituted a best practice but didn't go overboard with it.  After all, SQL Server 2005 presents the developer with many alternate ways to architect a database driven application.  There's are going to be many good ways to implement the database access that depend on the specifics of the situation.

Would I buy this book?  Yes, but quickly. It was written in the winter of 2004 and it’s aging quickly.  While I think it will be worthwhile through the beta phases of SQL Server 2005, by the time the product is released next summer I’ll be looking for other sources of information.