So, Where's the Book?

This time I wanted to write a book that would last beyond the current version of Visual Basic, Visual Studio and SQL Server. That’s one reason I pulled the “2005” from the title. The new book takes a big step back and for the first time includes chapters to help those without 10 years of experience in data access get a foothold on the technology before diving into subjects like, optimizing queries, rights management, CLR executables, sophisticated connection management or business rule schemes. For example, the new book has a chapter that answers the question "How Does SQL Server Work?" I included this content because of the questions we get from the newsgroups and my sessions that belie a fundamental understanding of SQL Server’s inner-workings. I show how a query is processed, compiled and cached and how SQL injection can give your simple application a passkey to the entire system. I talk about performance, security and best practices in terms anyone can understand.

I recognize that most of the developers I meet are specialists. They understand hotel management, healthcare, time-and-billing, insurance, federal accounts, oil-field management or process-control issues but they don’t necessarily know how to store data and retrieve it efficiently. They often don’t understand tiers or strongly typed data structures and sometimes could care less. In some shops “efficiency” means fewer lines of code to write and support instead of being able to fetch data faster. In other cases, techniques to blast millions of rows of data from place to place is also important—given my penchant for “really-big” data, I try to show a number of patterns that avoid building bulk-copy replacements.

Security is also a big issue and one that (or so it seems) not everyone understands. It’s critically important for everyone assigned the responsibility to handle our data to understand how to protect that data from those that would compromise it. The solution to this problem is more than just encrypting files and columns, login accounts and credentials. Since Visual Studio does little to help set and manage database rights, the book discusses how to use the tools in SQL Server Management Studio to deal with this responsibility. There really isn’t a single chapter on security—the concepts are woven into the fabric of each chapter.

I can’t tell you how frustrated I am at this point in time—I’ve been telling people that I’m suffering from post librum depression. Now that the book is pretty much written I really want to show it to everyone but I can’t. At this point I’m still waiting for the reviews and edits to come back. They tell me the book is on the fast track—I certainly hope so. Perhaps we’ll see it before the fall conferences.

As I still want to keep writing, it’s clear that technical writers are going to have to come up with other ways to get our content into the hands of the public. I think EBooks might (just might) be a good way to go. This approach really hinges on how secure we can make the content. Even though I only sold one copy in Hong Kong, my 3^rd edition was very popular in China. I really think that some tough-to-crack technique needs to be found to protect our intellectual property from those that would steal it.