This is one of the few SQL books that has practical examples and addresses DB2, Informix, SQL Server, and Oracle. It contains excellent facts on how SQL is processes, which one must understand to write top performing SQL. The authors accomplished just that with this excellent book. You'll get hard to find details on query optimizers, B+tree index structures and many myths you have had will be demystified...

Over the years I've developed a number of systems that utilized relational databases. When I developed or used a complex and/or large database, more often than not I found that database performance was the main issue, especially in real-time or near real-time applications. I have been interested in the databases *only* to the point of satisfying my projects' needs and considered them subordinate to the rest of the systems. I did realize the complexity of RDBMSs implementations, but never cared to learn more than I necessary to solve an immediate problem at hand. Maybe this is why I've never really enjoyed reading about the databases: I believed that the databases and SQL were quite boring comparing to all the elegance and slickness of C++, Java, CORBA, and other object-oriented technologies.

"SQL Performance Tuning" changed my perception of that; I was hooked just after just a few sentences. The language, the obvious depth of the authors' knowledge, the wide and careful coverage of all related issues, including the very fundamentals of the relational databases are presented as needed; and mostly, the enjoyably right balance between the theory and practice makes this book an outstanding read. I have not read most of it yet, but I am very excited about what I will find in the rest of it, even if it is something that I think I know well.

There's a lot of ground to cover between being able to put together a SQL query that runs and being able to construct a query that works well. The journey is all the more complicated when you're trying to target multiple RDBMSes, each with its own nuances and oddities. That's where this book shines. By going for breadth--picking 8 major RDMBS and contrasting how they behave in the face of various SQL constructs and optimizations, plus covering some general theory, this book conveys a quality of information that vendor-specific books lack. I knew a fair amount about databases and SQL before picking up the book, and came away with a much better feeling for the terrain, and a new set of optimization tricks.

It's unfortunate, but perhaps unavoidable, that some details (e.g. lack of information on transactions and subselects in MySQL) where out-of-date by the time the book was published. It's also unfortunate that the authors were prevented by vendor license agreements from providing performance hard numbers.

Don't get this book to learn how to optimize for a particular vendor's database. Study it to broaden your skills.

The book gives many examples of how to fine-tune SQL statements, and usually displays performance gain/loss resulted from the fine-tuning right below the examples. But the result is shown in the format "##/8", meaning the DBMS's of ## vendors out of the "big 8" show performance gain. For me this information is not too much helpful, since I only work on Microsoft SQL Server and am not very interested in other verdors. If the book can give more vendor-specific examples and explanations it will be more helpful, at least for me.

This book, SQL Performance Tuning, has proved to be one of the most invaluable books in my reference collection of SQL books. Some of the more complex and unanswerable questions that have cropped up in the shop I work at have been revealed with simplistic elegance in this book. Topics covered include General Tuning, Specific Tuning, Join Plans, Join Strategies, B-Tree Structure, Indexes, Keys, Foreign Keys, Query Prepping, Locks, and this is but to name a few. One nice feature about this book is it's not vendor specific. It covers the "Big Eight" RDBMS so this book has dual value to me as I use both SYBASE and MSSQL 2000. Buy this book. It will reveal the secrets of the SQL universe to you.