Guru's Guide offers the best set of information on the marked. It quickly becomes a friend you cannot live without, when approaching the boundaries of the usual coding.

The guide is directed towards the 2000 version, but its transact-SQL examples are just as easy applied to 2005.

With my full recommendations

Guldmann,Denmark

I was looking for some SQL Server books to get started on my work to move from Access to SQL Server and these books were just what I was looking for.

I am a database consultant with Microsoft, and would not be without these books. I strongly recommend the boxed set of three books to everyone working with SQL Server. I also personally know Ken, and his overall knowledge of SQL Server and Windows development is tops.

If you're thinking of setting up a database to keep track of your local phone book or kitchen recipes, go get something else. (That is, if the price hasn't already told you that.) Note the title: The Guro's Guide. And he means it.

If you're a database developer or administrator using Microsoft SQL Server, get this book today. It would be nice to think that all the big databases met the ANSI standard and were therefore truly portable from database to database and it would be nice to have a Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny. Instead we are left with really having to understand deeply. And this Guru knows what's going on where.

There are three books in this series. I'm more into programming so I found the book on Transact-Sql to be the one that I pick up the most. It's got more stuff on T-SQL than any of the half dozen other books I have, some of which are much bigger. What that means is that the writing style doesn't waste a lot of time on excess verbage. It's tight and concise. And that means not for beginners looking for a lot of this is a database kind of stuff.

But the volume that I need the most is the Guide to Architecture and Internals. I don't use it often, but when I do it is likely to be the only book available that tells me what I need to know at that moment. It's also something you might keep by your bedside. Unless I'm working on a specific problem, thirty seconds and I'm out.

The third book is on Stored Procedures (just in case you want to run faster), XML and HTML.

Conclusion, if you're serious about SQL Server, you can't do any better.