I saw this book come out, and had high expectations. The authors are all great guys who really know their stuff. What's more, Donald Farmer is _the_ guy for Data Mining, so I was hoping for a big section about the improvements in that area for SQL 2008.

Looking through it though, it feels like a book that was written for SQL 2005 that just got updated a little for SQL 2008, and that wasn't what I was wanting. And to boot, there are things that are just plain missing. There's not a single page on Data Mining, and some of my favourite features just don't appear. For Xmpl, in the FOR XML section, there's no mention of FOR XML PATH at all - which has to be the best way of using FOR XML.

However, I will still recommend this book. I will recommend this book to people who are moving from SQL 2000 and want to know what's new in both SQL 2005 and 2008, but there is a better reason again:

It's really honest! It's written by Microsoft guys, and they give really frank opinions about things. There are times when they happily point out that one feature or another isn't really as useful as it sounds. It's the kind of thing that more books need.

I needed to get up to speed fast with SQL 2008 as we are migrating our entire infrastructure to windows 2008 products, this book helped me do it. There are many changes in SQL 2008 from new data types, high availability improvements, admin scripting with powershell, my favorite is intellisence is finally in the query windows. This book explained the newly redone reporting services well. It is nothing like the Reporting services in 2005. Good explanations of the new policy management feature in SQL 2008, as well as the linq to SQL. As a first book out of the gate it is a good overview. It allowed me to get my SQL 2000 and 2005 servers up to 2008 with minimal headache. Now we can concentrate on exploiting the new features.

I've just finished reading the "Development in SQL Server" section of this book (i.e. 40% of the total book).

I assumed the book related solely to SQL Server 2008. The book's introduction, forward, back cover content, and free downloadable chapter 1 led me to that belief.

However, the book relates to both 2005 and 2008, and frustratingly it typically does not say what features belong to which database version.

I wanted a book that showed me what was new in SQL Server 2008, I know what is in 2005, I have several books on it! I think the publishers etc have been very misleading with this book's title.

That said, the content of the book is very good.

The book is large (784 pages) and heavy. A book containing SQL Server 2008 only content would perhaps contain only 300 pages, and be more convenient to read and carry.

The book's real title is "Accelerated SQL Server 2005 and 2008"