So I have been a bit remiss on my blogging the book duties. The fact is, the first 8 chapters were fairly heavy rewrites and reworkings, and even a good amount of new material.  But when doing a new version of a book that has already existed, you do need to reuse a good deal of the material from previous version.  Chapters 9, 10, and 11 are these chapters for this edition of the book.  The chapters are:

• Chapter 9 – Database Security and Security Patterns – The biggest change to this chapter was the differences that Contained Database bring to the picture.
• Chapter 10 – Table Structures and Indexing – Minimal changes to this chapter, mostly concerning some of the changes to compression. Since columnstore indexes aren’t really pertinent to OLTP databases, I didn’t do anything with them. An example of a columnstore index will appear in Chapter 12
• Chapter 11 – Coding for Concurrency – Again, not a tremendous difference for Denali, so just a bit of touch up.

Then comes Chapter 12. Back in the original version of the book, I had a reporting chapter, and I wasn’t amazingly pleased with it. So in 2005 I cut it, and decided to leave it out.  But it always felt like a bit of a hole in the book, having to say to “don’t denormalize and do reporting in your OLTP database, build a data warehouse, which I won’t talk about”.  Since those early years, I have learned a lot about data warehousing, attended a Kimball class on on dimensional modeling, and have designed our corporate data warehouse (with the requisite original “failure” before training, naturally.)  But I had to face facts, I was not the right person to write even a chapter on reporting/dimensional modeling.

I had made a decision to not have cowriters for this version, a bit for space reasons (I loved having Kevin Kline as a cowriter for the past two versions, but I just didn’t have space last time, and we made it a download), a bit for coordination reasons (I had a devil of a time with a spatial section for the last book), and a bit for selfish reasons (you can figure that out for your own self.)  But a few months ago, as the outline gelled, I decided I just needed something about dimensional modeling…

So I reached out to a particular writer named Jessica Moss (@jessicammoss) that I have known for a while, and had recently worked with on my data warehouse project as a mentor to help our team grow quite a bit in our ETL skills and to help mold our design.  So I asked her if she wanted to write a chapter on dimensional modeling, and she accepted.  I have seen her early version of the chapter, and I am very excited to add it as chapter 12.

Only one more chapter to write, number 13, which I will blog about in the next day or two once I get my ideas down on “paper” (and if assuming I don’t decide to split the chapter, will annoy my editor, so probably not!)