As some of you may know, I am writing a new book called High Performance Index Maintenance. As an experiment within the SQL Server community, I have been asking for DBAs to provide feedback on the books contents.
In my first blog about this topic, I asked people to provide me feedback on the book’s outline. I got a total of 7 people who reviewed my outline and provided feedback. I found this very useful, and the book will be better because of this feedback.
I want to continue this experiment, by occasionally blogging about what I am writing about in the book, and getting your feedback on it.
For example, as DBAs, we all know what an extent is, or do we? As part of an introductory chapter I am writing for the book, I wanted to give a short, succinct definition of what an extent is.
You would think that this would be easy to do, but I did some digging around (because I like to verify my facts) and got two different answers. For example, the SQL Server 2008 Books Online says that an extent is “a collection of eight physically contiguous pages. Then I went to a well-known reference book on SQL Server internals and found this definition: “An extent is made up of eight logically contiguous pages.”
OK, so which is it? Is an extent a collection of eight physical or logical pages?
Tell me what you think, and why. Once I get your feedback, then I’ll share with you what I think the definition should be.
Normally when I write a book, I create a book outline, give it to my editor for feedback, make some changes, then begin writing the book.
I would like to try something different, assuming you are interested. Since I am at the very early stage of creating the book’s outline, would you like to review it and give me some feedback? I am sure that if I could get several (or many) SQLServerCentral.Com members to offer me their advice on the outline, that I could write an even better book than if I did all the outlining by myself.
So what do you say. Do you want to help out?
The book is tentatively called “High Performance Index Maintenance,” and as you can guess from the title, it is a very narrowly focused topic. The goal is to keep the book under 75 Word pages, and then publish it as a compact reference book that will be given away free as an e-book, and in some cases, as a printed book.
If you have some extra time, and you have a lot of experience with index maintenance, please e-mail me at bradmcgehee@hotmail.com, and I will send you a copy of the draft version (which is about 6 pages). You can make any comments you want in the Word document, and then return it to me no later than Friday, February 6, 2009.
In return, when the book is finally printed as a paperback version, I will send you an autographed copy. I will also mention you in the book, by name, for your contribution to the outlining process.
Thanks!
