SQL Server related thoughts

I buy a lot of technical books, I have at least 10 SQL 2008 books, I normally go for the professional versions and I actually read them. The trouble is there huge! They are a pain to carry round and just plain awkward to read. I usually end up using a stand as most technical books have walkthrough’s or demos – try holding up one of those books or even prop them up while you are trying to type. This means I generally only read in the evenings at home. When I saw the 24 hour trainer book I figured here is a good sized book I can carry around and actually read.

I have always struggled with SSIS, it looks cool and seems friendly but whenever I tried to do anything I couldn’t figure out my arse from my elbow.  I have a need to sync databases, cubes, packages etc between environments. I figured it would be a cool to try and do it in SSIS. Solving my problem and increasing my knowledge at the same time.

I originally started watching the dvd demos and following along. Then I switched to the book – don’t get me wrong it was great to see the packages being constructed – (nice to see it instead of following on from a book). But the book presented the “try it” with hints so you could attempt to build the package without just mimicking the demo. Also the DVD was not the greatest quality – I found it hard to see some of the scripts, when I didn’t have the book in front of me.

I named all my packages as the task that was being covered instead of chapter name as suggested because I feel like I can refer back to them easily- I did all my script tasks in C# – the book was VB only.

Overall I found this to be an excellent book, I really learnt a lot. I definitely appreciate the smaller size.

Note: Authors – how about breaking your books into series to keep the size down.

I’m going to attempt to build my Environment Sync – if it works I’ll post some details