>> Bob Ward wrote a new book called
SQL Server Revealed and he's here to
tell us all about it today on Data Exposed.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi, and welcome to another episode of Data Exposed.
I'm your host, Jeroen, and today we have
a very special guest SQL royalty, Bob Ward.
>> SQL royalty, I don't know.
I'm not sure if I heard that one before but yeah,
thanks, Jeroen. Great to be here.
>> Yeah. So rumor is you wrote another book.
I know you had a book on SQL Server on Linux.
I read it, I have it.
It's signed by you even, thank you for that.
>> You're welcome.
>> So the rumor is on the street, there's another one.
>> There is another one. Can you believe that.
You'd think after the abuse of writing one,
you wouldn't do another one but I did.
I wrote the first one,
it was a hard project. I enjoyed doing it.
It was a labor of love, and I got
done and I told my wife and my boys,
I'm like, "I'm not doing any more of
these. They're so hard to do."
>> All right.
>> I don't know, I just got the itch to do another one.
>> So a couple of years later you're back at it?
>> Actually, a back-to-back.
I wrote the Linux one and that came out
last year and almost like a month or two later,
I'm starting the next one.
>> So you said to yourself, and to your wife,
and your family, "I'm never going to
do this again." The next morning you start again.
>> The next morning I start cranking it out.
There's this product, you may have heard of it,
called SQL Server 2019. Never heard of this, right?
>> No.
>> So we have just announced that at Ignite last year,
and that's when the book Linux had come out.
It was then, around that time.
>> Yeah.
>> So I thought to myself,
"I wonder if I should write a book about 19."
It's lot of work I've been doing over
the last year, and that was the journey.
So the book is called SQL Server 2019 Revealed.
Reveal, is that a cool name?
>> That is a very cool name.
As a matter of fact, I tried searching for it.
>> Oh, you tried.You found it.
>> Is this it?
>> That is it, yes.
That is the book, I know.
It's a catchy name, I realize.
I think the word reveal just means behind the scenes.
>> Okay.
>> Because, Jeroen, one of the things that was fun doing this
as I interviewed a lot of people in the engineering team.
This book is really written for
the SQL community but it's powered by the engineering team.
So what you have here is a series of chapters that are really
stories about functionality in SQL 19,
about the engineering team.
So for example, I might have a feature on
performance and I would talk to
Pedro Lopes about what the work he did,
and why did you do it, and when did it start.
I like history a little bit.
>> Okay.
>> So I spent the first chapter talking to
Slava Oaks and Travis Wright about how did this all start,
why did you-all start this madness.
So there's some fun stories in there as well.
>> Cool.
>> It's very conversational, I'm
a conversational person, and you'll find that.
But it's also got a lot of demos and examples.
Almost every chapter has examples on GitHub for you to read,
try it out, read,
try it out, all sorts of things.
>> Good balance between understanding,
what's going on, why did we do this, how did we did it.
>> Correct.
>> Who did it?
>> Yeah.
>> Right? Highlighting those people as well and then learning
about how it works and doing it to yourself.
So Big Data Clusters, did it make it in?
>> Big Data Clusters made it
in and I did a really unique approach there.
Big Data Clusters is one of the biggest things we did in 19.
>> Sure.
>> But what I chose to do is put that at the end of the book.
There's a couple reasons why.
One is I'm writing the book
during the preview of SQL Server, right?
>> Okay.
>> Big Data Clusters was really
a big thing we did during the release.
So I want to make sure in the book,
I got almost everything about it that's up to date.
So one of the cool things I learned about
this book is it literally
does reflect everything that's in the release of SQL Server 19,
yet I was able to write it during the preview.
The other reason to put Big Data Clusters at
the end is that it encompasses
what Containers, Linux, Kubernetes, PolyBase,
so what I do is, in the book,
I teach you those concepts in
the book and so then you learn about those basics,
and then you get the Big Data Clusters, you get all that now.
So you understand how to put it all together in a solution.
>> Okay. It's set up starting
with the whole thing in the beginning,
and then decompose it, you start building it.
>> I build it up, and it end with a bang.
>> It's like a cliffhanger, maybe.
>> A little bit of a cliff, yeah. I can't think that
someone looking at it. That's right.
>> The end of the last phase.
>> Absolutely.
>> Aren't there any dirty secrets?
>> No, there's nothing like that.
>> But it's reveal, right?
>> It's reveal but there are some fun stories of
behind the scenes of why we did something,
always encrypted, let's pick on that one.
It's a security model we have and then encryption.
Well I went back to the team and
said, "Where did this start from?"
As it turns out, I'm starting Microsoft research.
I don't think anybody knows that and I got
a chance to interview the Microsoft researcher.
>> Cool.
>> You pick on Polybase,
I went back and e-mailed David DeWitt,
one of the original founders of this,
and I found him at MIT and I said, "Why did you do this?"
So I put that stuff in the book.
That's like the nuggets I think people enjoy reading.
I did that on Linux and I did in this book too.
>> Wow. So this is going to
be in time for the holidays, hopefully?
>> It's in pre-order right now as we
speak and I hope to have this thing out soon,
very, very soon, definitely before the holidays.
Usually, they come form
an e-books earlier than the printed versions.
Like the Linux book, it's fairly long.
I think it's almost like 500 pages.
>> The Linux book was pretty.
>> It was pretty thick. Now this book by the way,
Jeroen, is everything that's new in 19.
You need some fundamental knowledge of SQL, I think,
to pick it up but it is end-to-end.
It covers everything in the release,
from performance to security to availability,
the Linux, containers, Big Data Clusters,
you name it. I've got it all in there.
>> Because you mixed it with stories and background,
it doesn't feel to me like I've not read it.
>> Yes of course, yeah. I can't wait for you to read it, though.
>> Yeah. So it doesn't sound to me
like a dry list of features, like "Oh, we can do.
We can do this, and this is how you do it."
Because you have this interaction
with the people on the interviews now.
>> The other thing I did not mention,
you might find it, is not just listing features.
I do it from a challenge solution perspective.
>> Okay.
>> Okay, here's your challenge that
you have today and here's why 19
has things together to give you
a solution, like intelligent performance.
You don't want to change your app, you want to get faster.
That's a challenge you have or I don't
want to do an expensive tuning,
how does SQL 19 solve that?
Then the cool thing is I'll put in
maybe screenshots of how it looks when you run
it or give you an exercise to confirm to put it all together.
>> Awesome. So yeah,
I cannot wait to get my hands on it.
>> Thank you. It was exciting to write.
>> Yeah, I can see that. So okay, cool.
So everything that you need to know about SQL Server 2019,
the way it's built,
the why it was built,
by whom it was built,
everything is in this one book
called SQL Server 2019 Revealed. Right?
>> Absolutely, Jeroen. Yeah. I'm excited to see it come out.
>> Perfect. So with that,
thank you, Bob, for being here.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> It's exciting to have you and thank you for watching.
Please like and subscribe to the video,
comment, and hope to see you next time. Thanks.