SQL Server: The Complete Reference

I gave up on this book by page 55. I found the style plodding with only marginally helpful analogies. But the real problem was a series of muddled, misleading and downright inaccurate statements and references. There are too many to list them all here, but a few examples:

Muddled on p 50: "You can create additional indexes for a table, targeted at certain columns. Multiple indexes require more resources, however, so you need to be conservative and limit new indexes to columns you know are frequently searched on. In other words, no two rows can have identical values for the index key." What does the third statement have to do with the first two?

Inaccurate on page 48, figure 2-7 shows two tables, but the caption refers to three tables and using A, B and C for names/labels which do not appear in the figure: "The primary key in Table A links the row to the rows in Tables B and C, which bear the foreign keys. All three rows combine to form a unique record. If you delete one of the rows, you actually break the record and wreck the integrity of your data." The last statement is at best misleading, at worst inaccurate.

In discussing Constraints (NOT NULL) on p 52: "As discussed earlier, NULL means that the record is deemed to be unknown or missing." Actually, the value of a column for the row is unknown or missing, not the whole record.

I cannot rely on the information I learn from a book that contains such problems and cannot recommend it to friends.

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