SQL Server 2008 Administration, by Ross Mistry

This book is more of a reference book than a teaching book, but that didn't keep me from reading it! My company paid for it so that I could study for my certification exam coming up.

SQL Server 2008 has a lot of sweet features.

• Resource Governor. Create limits for the amount of CPU that user connections can use.
• Policy Based Management - set constraints on "Facets", such as names of objects. This would have been useful when I was obsessed about prefixes on tables at my last job!
• High availability options, which were also on SQL Server 2005!
  Clustering - On failure, the server automatically fails over to a different server. The disk space is shared between the two servers, and a virtual server manages the name of the server.
  Mirroring - Each database transaction is also sent to a different server to be recorded to its database as well. A high safety mode can be enabled, where the first database can't commit any additional transactions until the second one has reported back with success
  Log Shipping - similar to Mirroring, except the transactions are sent in chunks (called logs) at scheduled times.
  Replication - a publisher sends updates on objects to subscribers

Some very nice things about the book are the "What's New with SQL Server 2008" at the beginning of every chapter, and the bullet point summary at the end of every chapter.

It will be good to have this book around as a reference.