Having seen the request by redgate to review the Tribal SQL book, I leapt at the chance. I love the idea of these books and having read the MVP Deep Dives books (Book 1 and Book 2) previously I wanted to see what this one offered.

As with the MVP Deep Dives books, Tribal SQL’s authors have donated their royalties to charity, and in this case they go to Computers For Africa. There are also alot of well known names in this book with Dave Ballantyne,  Mark Rasmussen, Bob Pusateri, Stephanie Locke and Matt Velic, among them.

Tribal SQL is a good size book, weighing in at 454 pages, with 15 chapters covering various topics relevant to DBA’s. Each of the chapters has been written by a previously  unpublished author, and all are based on their experiences. There are chapters covering most topics from Internals Data Compression, Performance tuning, Auditing and SQL Injection, through to less technical areas such as Reporting and Database Mail. Additionally, there are sections on personal skills which include Communication Skills, Project Management and an Introduction to Agile Database Development.

While some of the sections don’t go into as much detail as you’d hope, this isn’t the point of this book (from my understanding). It covers each of the areas well, leaves you interested for more, and most of the chapters include links to various sources for further reading.

I enjoyed reading this book, and would highly recommend it for others. Chapters that I got the most out of were the Internals (Mark Rasmussen), Windowing Functions (Dave Ballantyne, and particularly since I was doing the SQL 2012 Querying exam), and the SQL Injection (Kevin Feasel).

My only criticism suggestion is that I’d like to see an eBook/Kindle version of it so I can have it in the eBook library I have on my Tablet, on the grounds that I can use it as a reference book.

You can read more about this book at the books website – TribalSQL.com