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Inside SQL Server 6.5

Brent Ozar reviews a blast from the past:

I picked up half a dozen used books about SQL Server 6.5, then spent a delightful weekend reading them. Seriously delightful – lemme tell you just how into it I was. Erika and I eat all weekend meals out at restaurants, but she saw me so happily curled up in my chair reading that she insisted on going out and getting tacos for us just so I wouldn’t have to get up. I was having that good of a time READING BOOKS ABOUT SQL SERVER 6.5. (Also, Erika is amazing. Moving on.)

To bring you that same fun, I wanna share with you a few pages from Inside SQL Server 6.5 by Ron Soukup, one of the fathers of SQL Server

It’s a great read.  My contribution to the Old But Good oeuvre is the Handbook of Relational Database Design by Candace Fleming and Barbar von Halle.  For my money, it has what I still consider the best primer on database normalization out there.  It also has a bunch of stuff that we should be glad we don’t do anymore, like figuring out specific file layouts for non-clustered indexes to minimize the number of disk rotations needed to retrieve a record of data.