Foreword
One of the concepts that I've always been intrigued with is the idea of institutional knowledge. Institutional knowledge is the accumulated wisdom of many individual practitioners across many years, even generations, of practice and in a multitude of situations and scenarios. Those professions that have developed deep wells of institutional knowledge for their practitioners have become our most respected careers.
There are many examples of how the institutional knowledge of a certain profession, once it reached critical mass, resulted in enormous breakthroughs in productivity, creativity, and innovation. When the master merchants of medieval Genoa and northern Italy developed the concept of double-entry accounting (which they kept as a trade secret as long as they could), the new skills which enabled them to always know how many assets and liabilities they had at any given moment transformed their merchant houses into the wealth-generating powerhouses that financed the Renaissance. Double-entry accounting was a small change from the long-standing practice of singleentry running tallies (like in check book registers), but as is common with the law of unintended consequences, it proved to be so valuable that it served as the founding principle used by chartered and certified accountants today. When the master builders of medieval Europe incorporated the algebraic and geometric formulas of recently translated Arab-owned Greek manuscripts of Euclid and Pythagoras, they were able to transform the squat and ponderous churches of Christendom into the soaring and incredibly beautiful Gothic cathedrals that, for the first time in history, had more window than wall and stood more than a couple stories in height.
There are other more recent examples too. The physicians of England and Italy first argued in the 1850s that illness was not caused by bad-smelling air (the so-called miasma theory of disease propagation that had stood for centuries), but was instead caused by invisible agents too small to see. The medical profession, when complemented by the first anesthesias, soon ushered in a new phase of human health and longevity that is the basis of modern medicine. Here's another example many people may not know. Western civilization's first scientists where Christian monks who had devoted their lives to explaining divine creation. In this endeavor, they were called natural philosophers (that is, philosophers who explained the natural world and were exemplified by individuals such as Francis Bacon). They helped develop the foundational principles that would become the scientific method that is now so common as to be taken for granted in the Western world. Yet, in their day and in succeeding generations, these concepts and the accumulating institutional wisdom transformed the world.
Today, in the early 21st century, we have a host of new professions centered on information technology (IT) that didn't exist for earlier generations. Among the foremost of these careers is my own chosen profession, database administration. Database administration holds its prominent place because of the absolute value of data to the organization. If an application server experiences a catastrophic failure, management's first question is "How fast can we recover the database?" The hardware is inconsequential. The application, while not trivial, is not the first order of business. The database comes first because the hardware and application is the medium that hosts the part of the application that is valuable–the data. In this sense, database administrators are vital to organizations because they are the guardians of that most valuable corporate asset–its data.
As you read Rod's book, I hope you come away with two major impressions (in addition to the vast number of tips and tricks). The first is that, through Rod's collection of accumulated wisdom, you can see that our profession is maturing rapidly. Database administrators now must not only know the internals of the SQL Server relational engine, but must also have a good understanding of the underlying hardware, high availability, security, monitoring, performance tuning, troubleshooting, as well as the all important backup and recovery. Secondly, you begin to see, as you read Rod's book and its accompanying website at www.SQLCrunch.com, that good processes are often as valuable as understanding the underlying technology. Individuals that enact worst processes (or simply fail to implement best practices) run the risk of spending their time on redundant work and inefficient activities, as well as to put at risk the very assets (that is, the database) over which they are guardians.
My work at Quest Software since 2002 and my years on the board of directors for the Professional Association for SQL Server have enabled me to evangelize the message of rigorous processes and high quality standards for all activities undertaken by database administrators. In the following years, I've had the good fortune to meet many like-minded practitioners like Rod. In a word, we've been devoted students of institutional knowledge for the SQL Server professional.
While Rod's book is not an exceptionally big one, its information is highly concentrated and contains an exceptional wealth of actionable knowledge. Don't forget that many publishers equate the size of the book with its value and, consequently, attempt to manipulate its perceived value with lots of graphics, wide spacing, and large fonts. There's no need for that with this book, since it's simply loaded with excellent and immediately useful information. Whether you're a new and inexperienced database administrator or an old hand with decades of experience, I know that you'll find the collected institutional knowledge in this book to be extremely valuable. By applying the knowledge offered in the pages of this book, you'll design, configure, implement, and maintain databases that are as good as any in the world. This will lead to better applications and, in turn, better organizations built upon those organizations.
Kevin Kline
Technical Strategy Manager, Quest Software Founding board member of PASS, the Professional Association for SQL Serverhttp://sqlblog.com/kevin_kline/