About the Authors

Bennett McEwan is president of Geist, LLC, a company in scenic upstate New York, specializing in explaining SQL Server. The work Ben enjoys most is mentoring, where he helps programmers or database administrators through the tough spots in mission-critical applications.

Ben also teaches SQL Server training classes, writes and designs Visual Basic client/server applications, and consults on difficult SQL Server performance issues. You can catch him on comp.databases.ms-sqlserver and in the pages of Microsoft SQL Server Professional (Pinnacle Publishing). E-mail Ben at bmcewan@metis.com, visit his page at http://www.metis.com/~geist, or call him directly at (518) 274-5042. If you send him a box of cigars, he has been known to give foolishly discounted rates.

David Solomon is president of metis technologies, llc. David, who has contributed to several books for Sams Publishing, including Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed and Sybase Unleashed, wrote the material for Week 3 of this book. He consults, teaches, and speaks frequently on SQL Server and related topics. David can be reached at dsolomon@metis.com.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to David Solomon for getting me the book contract, proofreading most of my work, and getting me started with SQL Server in the first place. Thanks to comp.databases. ms-sqlserver for providing me with lots of problems to solve and for providing a forum to answer the intriguing SQL Server questions. Thanks to Microsoft for putting SQL Server on a six-month revision cycle. Business has never been better. —Ben McEwan

There are a handful of people who’ve helped see this book to completion. My coauthor, Ben McEwan, picked up the slack when I couldn’t write as many chapters as we had originally planned. His work on the first two weeks is really exceptional, and his comments and suggestions regarding my chapters were thoughtful and insightful. Friends and associates at Intelliquest Communications (particularly Nalini Subu) were patient when I faced deadlines, and they also contributed to the substance of this work. Nalini and I worked hard together on a useful template for a bug-free stored procedure environment.

The hundreds, or perhaps, thousands, of students and clients I’ve worked with have also helped by posing questions and making me think about the problems out there and how they might be solved. Some folks on the microsoft.products.sqlserver.server and .programming forums also helped. They brought out some tough questions that led to interesting findings. And the comments on those forums by my peers and colleagues, Roy Harvey, Kalen Delaney, and Neil Pike, to name a few, helped sharpen my skills.

Last, most emphatically, and always, I am indebted to my wife, Carola. Apparently, I am, well, intolerable while these book projects are underway. The deadlines take their toll on all of us, and through it all Carola hasn’t changed the locks, left home, or murdered me. This book is dedicated to her with all my love and admiration.—David Solomon

Thanks to Database America for supplying the raw data for the stores table in the bigpubs database. Without their contribution, the information in this database would be incomplete and much less useful.—Ben McEwan and David Solomon