The Rational Guide to SQL Server Notification Services (Rational Guides)

By Joe Webb

A guide to using SQL Server Notification Services to design and build notification applications for subscribers. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0972688811
• ISBN13: 9780972688819
• Release Date: September 2004
• Publisher: Rational Press
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book

This is an excellent introductory book for Sql Server Notification Services especially when time is a constraint in learning the technology. The author does an excellent job in explaining the technology and uses a sample notification service application for doing so. The book also comes with 2 bonus chapters and source code for the sample application that can be downloaded from the publisher's web site after registering the book!

An excellent book with one fatal flaw

This book is an excellent introduction to Notification Services -- much, much better than what's available in Books Online or on the web. It's well-written, well-organized, and terse. A great text for someone just getting their feet wet. However, it has a fatal flaw that knocks it down from 5 to 4 stars: This book has no index. I'm incredibly disappointed by this. It means that this book, once read, will never be picked up again -- if I can't find information quickly enough, I won't bother. An index is key to a good tech book, but apparently Rational Press missed that memo. Great book, but buyer beware if you need something you can use as a reference later on down the road...

Notification Services at work...

We are a major player in the real estate industry. Our web site has millions of visits per day and has positioned itself as the focal point of listing finding. One recent requirement was to allow web users to subscribe to our data and be notified upon a listing change or new listing in an area. We immediately started looked at sql server 2000 notification services. The starting point for research was "The Rational Guide to SQL Server Notification Services". This is a great resource and its content has allowed our developers to rapidly build a custom solution for our needs. Great buy. Great technical content.

Let the Database Call You.

Suppose you're in charge of inventory at a store. Wouldn't it be nice of your computer system could notify you immediately that you're selling a lot of something that normally sells very slowly? This is exactly the situation that Micro SQL Server 2000 Notification Services is designed to handle. It is a platform that includes a notification engine to tell selected individuals about selected changes in the information in the database. Computer systems normally work in a pull oriented architecture i.e. you go to the web and ask for the sales figures for each inventory item to see if there is an anomoly. Notification services changes this model to a push orientation. You subscribe (we don't want to be doing SPAM) and based on the criteria you select you are automatically notified of changes in the underlying data structure. The Rational Guide books are somewhat of a new concept in publishing where a small book, compared with most computer books, can hold down the price and the size while devoting itself to one subject. In addition, the publisher has made additional information available on his web site to allow the reader to expand his knowledge beyond just this book. I like this concept. All computer books don't need to be 1,000 pages, much of which is just copied from the previous edition. The audience for this book is considered by the publisher to be a Beginner/Intermediate Developer. Beginner - yes, Notification Services are so new that almost all of us are beginners. But this is not the book for someone just starting out on SQL Server Excellent concept for a book, well executed.