There is no question in my mind right now that the SQL Server 2012 book I am most looking forward to having on my bookshelf is the Professional SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting by Christian Bolton (blog | @christianbolton) et al. I enjoyed Christians first book (Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting) as well, and I can only imagine how good the updated version will be so I wanted to take a moment and recommend it to everyone.

In fact, I’ve created a new bookshelf in my library, dedicated just to SQL 2012 books for now that are available on pre-order. As they become available I will move them onto my other shelves (technical, professional development, database design). But with SQL 2012 having been released into the wild this week I didn’t want to wait any longer to put together a list of books for people to browse.

You can check out the other books I have selected for my SQL 2012 library. And if you think there is a book I need to include in my list just leave me a comment or drop me an email.

Looking for a good book on SQL 2012? Only a handful are available right now, you can see a list of books available for pre-order over at Amazon. No, you won’t find my name as an author to any of them. I’ve been asked to write a chapter or two a few times but nothing has ever felt right so I’ve been declining the offers for writing but have been saying yes to doing some of the technical reviews. I actually enjoy the tech review as it let’s me (1) get a free copy of the book and (2) nitpick and tell people that they need to punch themselves harder.

As soon as I get my hands on some of the SQL 2012 books that are coming out I will get them added to my library.

Saw this review today and wanted to share it with everyone here:

http://www.mikefal.net/2012/01/03/dba-survivor-learning-how-to-rock-out-with-databases/

I’m touched that Mike would take the time to write such a wonderful (and unsolicited) review of “that little book” I wrote almost two years ago now. I’d like for you to read his entire review, but I am going to share his last paragraph with you here:

“Now many folks probably think this is just a book for the junior DBA, for someone who’s just getting started, but I know this book has value for data professionals of all levels. This book is not a detailed guide or roadmap for solving specific problems, but a series of highway sign posts to get people headed in the right direction. Maybe you are a fresh DBA, looking to get in to the industry or just survive your first week on the job. Or maybe you’re like me, a career DBA who is looking to refocus my career and looking for that “big picture view”. No matter how you got here, DBA Survivor is an excellent starting point for the rest of your database career.”

The holiday shopping season may be over, but my book would still make an excellent gift at any time of the year (yes, that *is* my opinion, thankyouverymuch).

Thanks Mike, next time I see you the bacon is on me!

If you could give just one thing to a person you know is starting out as a DBA, what would it be?

Well, my book, of course.

And as luck would have it, Apress is offering a 40% sale until Christmas, use the code SNOW11 at the checkout. I bet if you ordered it today you would still have time to give it as a gift.

http://www.apress.com/9781430227878

And thanks to everyone that has contacted me in 2011 with so many kind words regarding the book. I’m touched to know that my words have been able to help others get a leg up on a career that is often shrouded in mystery.

Yeah, the other Steve Jobs book which you can order by clicking on this link: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

I recently picked up a copy of this book. And by “picked up” I mean it was a gift from the amazing Suzanne Larocque (blog | @FemmeFoto) who wanted to help me become better at presenting. The only downside to the gift was that I received it the week before the PASS Summit, which meant is was far too late for me to incorporate any of the ideas into my talks at PASS.

Or was it?

And and even better question: Was I already doing some of the things mentioned?

I read the book in one evening, I simply could not devour it fast enough. Not because it was an amazing piece of work, but because I was fascinated by the structure. For the areas where I felt I was already succeeding in my presentations it was nice to have that affirmation. And for the areas where I am lacking it was nice to just ponder how I could alter my style but still remain “Tom”.

So, first disclaimer: I have been presenting and speaking to groups of people for over 20 years. I know that shocks some people, for different reasons I’m sure, but it is true. And I still get nervous every time.

Second disclaimer: I don’t think for a moment that I am Steve Jobs. And reading this book won’t change that. But I do have a desire to continue to get better at how I present my talks, whether it is at a SQL Saturday, a local PASS Chapter, a product demo for Confio, or while I introduce a keynote speaker for the PASS Summit (yeah…that WILL happen in 2012, so maybe the Mayans were right).

So what did I learn from the book? The section headers say it all, really:

1. Create the Story
2. Deliver the experience
3. Refine and rehearse

Now, there’s a LOT more to it than just that, but those three points are enough for me to rethink how I have been building my talks previously. One of the finer details mentioned in the book is a chapter called “Reveal a ‘Holy Shit’ Moment”, which has details accounts of presentations such as the time Jobs took that MacBook Air out of a fracken envelope while saying the words “the worlds thinnest notebook” over and over to the point you think Jobs had an MBA in “re-education”.

For most people I know that build talks they never really are able to accomplish ‘creating the story’, they just put text onto PowerPoint slides. It is something I struggle with as well. Two years ago or so I started doing my best to create the story first before I ever built one slide. I’d like to think it has helped my talks, given them more structure than they would have had otherwise.

And of course there is the delivery style. You need to know when you can make a joke, or when to pause, or raise your voice, etc. Lots of those details are in this book as well including the need for an antagonist (I plan on using @SQLClippy).

Oh, and one more thing: I need more props for my talks.

Recently I was contacted by Packt publishing regarding their book, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Administration Cookbook. I didn’t know that the book even existed! They were happy to provide me with a copy of the book in exchange for a review and I accepted their gracious offer. So, here we go!

I really enjoyed this book. Of course I knew I would since the forward was written by Brad McGehee (blog | @bradmcgehee), a man whose judgement I trust when it comes to database administration (among other things). I do not know the author (“Satya Shyam K Jayanty”), at least not yet, but his experience as a DBA shines throughout the book.

I especially like how the book is laid out. For example, there is a chapter named “Administering the Core Database Engine”, and in there you will find a “recipe” for “Administering SQL Server Replication processes”. In that section you are given some background information on replication, a section for “Getting Ready”, followed by a section named “How to do it…”, and then a section named “How it works…”. At the end of each section there is a “See Also” section that provides additional information for the reader should they want to take a deeper dive into the topic.

And that’s just section! You will find other sections such as “Preparing new Failover Cluster features”, and “Designing change tracking methodology”, and each section is written in the same clear manner. No matter what your skill level, this is a book any DBA would want to keep handy, for all occasions.

About the only thing I felt was missing from this cookbook was a few bacon recipes. I can only hope they make their way into a revision at some point.

You can also find the book listed over at Packt by clicking here.

Last month I told you about how Denny Cherry’s new book, Securing SQL Server had been released into the wild. Today I am here to tell you that I have added his book to my library.

I still remember the feeling I had when I was reviewing the book, the feeling that Denny knows enough about security that he is essentially an evil genius. Well, at least more evil than I am, as he was mentioning many different surface areas for attack that I had never considered. Either he has experience patching such holes, or exploiting them. I really don’t know which, but his experience shows.

One item he does mention should be familiar to most of you and that is SQL Injection. After reviewing the section I started to wonder if I could send out a tweet as an example:

SELECT cast(0x446F206E6F742072756E20636F646520796F752066696E6420696E2061205477656574 as varchar(max))

And I am always surprised when people take that code and run it (hopefully not against a production system).

Do yourself a favor and go buy a copy of the book today.

During the Free-Con before the PASS Summit last year I learned about the book Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully. I am not a professional consultant but I do some “odd jobs” from time to time for others. But the subtitle for the book is “A Guide to Giving & Getting Advice Successfully”, which is good stuff for anyone, consultant or not. I ordered the book a while back but only just got around to cracking it open. It was an easy read and I managed to get through it in about a week by squeezing in some reading time throughout my day.

The author does a wonderful job of interspersing his personal anecdotal stories along with his proprietary “laws” and “rules”. An example of such would be as follows:

The Rule of Three: If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking.

The Titanic Effect: The thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster.

The Hard Law: If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant.

As you read the book you start to get a sense that the author would have been successful in whatever path in life he would have chosen. Some people are like that, they have a way of observation and communication that puts them in position to be knowledgeable and capable of handling a variety of situations. (For another, go read The Genius: How Bill Walsh Reinvented Football and Created an NFL Dynasty).

I had more than a handful of favorite stories from the book. I especially liked the Orange Juice test (p32), which really hit home to me. Whenever I am presented with a problem I usually think of 5-6 reasons why it cannot be solved. With the Orange Juice test you understand that most problems can be solved, especially if you have money. As a consultant your role is not to tell your client that something cannot be done, rather it is to tell them “…I can help you, and this is what it will cost”. At the point it is up to the client to decide if the price matches the value.

The last thing I will leave you with is a quick story found on page 65:

An optimist and a pessimist are arguing about philosophy. The optimist declares “This is the best of all possible worlds.” The pessimist sighs and says, “You’re right.”

I’ve added this book to my library, it is in the Professional Development shelf.

I recently finished reading The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture. The book was recommended to me by one of the folks I met at the NASA tweetup last November as I was remarking about the differences between “old” and “new” media. The book is written by Andrew Keen, someone who has been in and around Silicon Valley from before Web 2.0 started. In other words, he has some perspective to offer. I didn’t think the book was a great one, but I did think it offered some good points about where we are today with “old” and “new” media.

The short of it is this: fact checkers. The traditional media sites are ones that actually employ people to check facts and make sure stories are true. Of course many believe that the traditional media suffers from the appearance that everyone involved has an agenda. But that isn’t new, really, even Edward Murrow had an agenda. And the greatest newsman I can recall, Walter Cronkite, someone I admire and believe was beyond reproach…well…he had an agenda as well (we all do, right?). He just did a better job at not letting that get in the way of facts, or so it seemed to me.

So the “new” media, which is essentially online, blogging, Facebook, Twitter, etc., suffers from a lack of fact checking. And the result of this? Well, first off we are being presented information that isn’t true, but we think it is because we read it on a website. We are also seeing a rise in plagiarism as many people feel it is fine to copy and paste material that is not theirs. But why would they bother? What is the point? For some they are just looking for page hits so they can either sell ads or promote themselves in order to land some clients.

And how many page hits do you need to make enough money to quit your day job? The book talks about how Guy Kawasaki, the man that spams my Tweetdeck with all sorts of links to stories, the man who generated 2.5 million hits to his blog in 2006…and earned $3,550 for all of those hits. [The next time you or anyone else talk about finding a way to generate more hits to a blog or website you should ask about the end goal. You don't need 2.5 million hits. What you want is the one hit that pays you 2.5 million dollars. But I digress.]

The author does tell a good story about Tower records and its demise and tries to draw some parallels. At the end of the day we are left with a communal society of amateurs, with no experts, and in order to make progress as a society we really need to have those experts. We need fact checkers. And no, Wikipedia does not count as a fact-based resource. It is staffed by the same amateurs that are running the blogs. (I once had a person tell me that they trust Wikipedia more than a blog post from some guy named Paul Randal, and I couldn’t believe what I heard.)

The growing distrust of traditional media along with the rise of the amateur is why I think The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is so popular. We don’t trust the older media as they have become overrun with people pushing their own agenda ahead of facts. With Jon Stewart we trust that we are getting the facts and he puts them in a way that makes us laugh. I wouldn’t doubt that Jon is probably one of the most trusted men in America today, ahead of anyone else in traditional media or government. We crave for someone to be an expert, to have the facts, and to present them to us. We crave this so much as a society that we are even willing to allow someone to do so in a comical way. Can you imagine Walter Cronkite hosting the Daily Show?

A long time ago my father told me “…don’t believe everything that you read and/or hear and only half of what you see”. I tend to remember that whenever I go online or watch one of the talking heads on TV. Sadly, I don’t think others do the same, but wish they would.

I am not adding the book onto my bookshelf at this time, but feel free to browse around for anything else you might like.

This past weekend while doing some Spring cleaning I came across this book on my bookshelf. I read it last year and found it to be a great read but for one reason or another I never got around to writing up a review. I forget how I came across the book to begin with, perhaps it was the word ‘accidental’ in the title that made me think it would be interesting.

Well, it certainly was. The book is the story of David Novak, current Chairman and CEO of YUM! Brands, the owners of KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Long John Silver’s, and A&W Restaurants. He tells his story and it is one I found to be fascinating. Novak is a former marketing executive and he has a handful of stories about some of the projects he was involved with through the years, many of them while at Pepsi. What I enjoyed most was probably how he was willing to talk about both his successful campaigns (Ray Charles and “You’ve Got The Right One, Baby” ) as well as the not-so-successful ones (Crystal Pepsi). Through it all you get the feeling that Novak is someone that is an open book himself and is probably the type of executive that really inspires others to perform at a high level.

There are a lot of stories in the book that I could spend time writing about here but instead what I want to do is convey what I consider the most important lesson. Novak could have spent his life feeling sorry for himself, but he didn’t. As you progress through the book you start to understand that Novak tends to take something positive from every experience he has, whether that is living in 32 trailer parks in 23 states by the 7th grade, or not getting the promotion you wanted. See, it’s not about what happens to you in life, it ‘s all about what you do with it when it happens.

Here is the link to the book:

The Education of an Accidental CEO: Lessons Learned from the Trailer Park to the Corner Office

It’s well worth a few dollars to have this book on your bookshelf. In fact, I decided to add it to my library here as well.