The book lacks enough 'hands on' excersizes, particularly regarding using views, stored procedures, and user-defined functions. Also, as you read through the book you can 'feel' it was co-authored. Much of the book is somewhat hard to read, but the chapters on Accessing, Inserting, and Updating Data are very easy to read with many hands-on exercizes. The chapter reviews are pretty useless for actually 'reviewing' the material, as it really only lists the topics covered and provides very little summary information of what was actually covered in the chapter. SYNGRESS books provide an excellent "2 minute drill" at the end of each chapter to review the details, but this SYBEX book does not contain any such tool.

The SYNGESS/Osborne book for MCDBA exam 70-229 "SQL Design" is due out in November, and I would recommend considering the SYNGRESS book before this SYBEX book.