If you're responsible for deploying or administering SQL Server 2005, this book's a gold mine. Straight from Microsoft, it delivers authoritative guidance on everything from planning to tuning, high availability to business intelligence.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Administrator's Companion offers immense value for DBAs working in any environment, including the most mission-critical. Upfront, it'll help you with capacity planning, then walk you through every facet of installation, upgrading, and network configuration.

It covers all the core DBA fundamentals (creating databases, tables, views, indexes, backup/restore, memory allocation, data partitioning, and so forth). But it includes equally detailed coverage of integration, analysis, reporting, and notification services for business intelligence. And when it's time to implement failover clustering and database mirroring, it'll help you there, too.