Kalen Delaney - Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Internals

As always, a work like this is not an individual effort, and for this current volume, it is truer than ever. I was honored to have five other SQL Server experts join me in writing SQL Server 2012 Internals , and I truly could not have written this book alone. I am grateful to Benjamin Nevarez, Paul Randal, Conor Cunningham, Jonathan Kehayias, and Bob Beauchemin for helping to make this book a reality. In addition to my brilliant co-authors, this book could never have seen the light of day without help and encouragement from many other people.

First on my list is you, the reader. Thank you to all of you for reading what I have written. Thank you to those who have taken the time to write to me about what you thought of the book and what else you want to learn about SQL Server. I wish I could answer every question in detail. I appreciate all your input, even when Im unable to send you a complete reply. One particular reader of one of my previous books, Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: The Storage Engine (Microsoft Press, 2006), deserves particular thanks. I came to know Ben Nevarez as a very astute reader who found some uncaught errors and subtle inconsistencies and politely and succinctly reported them to me through my website. Ben is now my most valued technical reviewer, and for this new edition, he is also an author!

As usual, the SQL Server team at Microsoft has been awesome. Although Lubor Kollar and Sunil Agarwal were not directly involved in much of the research for this book, I always knew they were there in spirit, and both of them always had an encouraging word whenever I saw them. Kevin Liu volunteered for the daunting task of coordinating my contracts with the SQL team, and always found me the right engineer to talk to when I had specific questions that needed to be answered.

Ryan Stonecipher, Kevin Farlee, Peter Byrne, Srini Acharya, and Susan Price met with me and responded to my (sometimes seemingly endless) emails. Fabricio Voznika, Peter Gvozdjak, Jeff East, Umachandar Jayachandran, Arkadi Brjazovski, Madhan Ramakrishnan, Cipri Clinciu, and Srikumar Rangarajan also offered valuable technical insights and information when responding to my emails. I hope they all know how much I appreciated every piece of information I received.

I am also indebted to Bob Ward, Bob Dorr, and Keith Elmore of the SQL Server Product Support team, not just for answering occasional questions but for making so much information about SQL Server available through white papers, conference presentations, and Knowledge Base articles. I am grateful to Alan Brewer and Gail Erickson for the great job they and their User Education team did putting together the SQL Server documentation in SQL Server Books Online .

I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to all of the SQL Server MVPs, but most especially Erland Sommarskog. Erland wrote the section in on collations just because he thought it was needed, and that someone who has to deal with only the 26 letters of the English alphabet could never do it justice. Also deserving of special mention are Ben Miller, Tibor Karaszi, and John Paul Cook, for all the personal support and encouragement they gave me. Other MVPs who inspired me during the writing of this volume are Hugo Kornelis, Rob Farley, and Allen White. Being a part of the SQL Server MVP team continues to be one of the greatest honors and privileges of my professional life.