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I’m almost a little sad to hear that the market for book publishers is back on an upswing. Economic downturns, like the .dot com bust, have an evolutionary impact on the industry. From programmers to software companies to publications, a downturn tends to weed out the lesser capable entities. Very Darwinian in a scary sort of way.

So with the upturn in the book market there will inevitably be more publications of less quality on the market. Good books are hard to find. Lets hope we don’t get back to the same level of crap that used to take up shelf space . It was insane. Back then I halfway expected to see “The Illustrated Guide to MS Notepad” published by Wrox and cobbled together with 15 different authors. Horrible!

Since good books are hard to find, I am always happy when I come across a gem. As mentioned before, I have a theory that in every category of writing there are a one or two books that are the absolute “bibles” of their kind. I am happy to say I found another one. This time on the subject of Transact SQL / SQL Server 2000.

Drumroll please….. And the winner is:

“Advanced Transact SQL for SQL Server 2000″ written by Itzik Ben Gan and Tom Moreau.

Itzik is one of my all time SQL heros. He has been writing a column for SQL Server magazine for a number of years. This column is always a very thought provoking read. Have you ever tried to paint a map using SQL? Itzik has! Some of this is even discussed in the book. But on a much more practical level, his book presents the single best solution to dealing with hierarchical data in an RDBMS that I have ever seen.

Hierarchical data is usually found in systems containing parent-child relationships between entities of the same type. For example a table of employees. Some employees are managers and some are not. Yet all are employees. In the manufacturing world exists the idea of a Bill of Materials (BOM) that contains parts which also contain parts. Again a hierachical scenario. A number of years ago I was fortunate enough to work with 2 excellent engineers on an MRP System for The International Space Station. Our single biggest issue was the hierarchical nature of the BOM. If I had Itziks solution back in those days I probably could have saved myself a few gray hairs.

The point is that this book is uniquely valuable in its treatment of hierarchies. Go check it out. I’m sure you will agree.