I realize it's been a long time since I've posted, but I have been traveling quite a bit, and when not traveling I am writing. I have a firm deadline for the next book,and it means every available hour that I am not teaching will have to be spent writing.
I just finished a major milestone, so I thought I would share that here....
I was dreading working on Chapter 7, called "Special Storage", because half of it was brand new stuff and it was really gory technical detail stuff. The old stuff is row-overflow, LOBs and partitioning, and the new stuff is filestream, sparse columns and compression. I was calling this my "Monster Chapter", but now it is done! I just sent the chapter in to my editor this morning... so I can take a short break, maybe even an hour or so. :-)
None of the rest of the chapters have nearly as much new content, and nothing is so deeply technical (bit and bytes oriented) as explaining the storage of sparse columns and compressed data. Even though, each chapter will take a least a week and maybe two.
The problem is that I am scheduled to be teaching quite a bit between now and end of the year, so there are few weeks to write. My all-in due date is middle of December, after that there are chapter reviews plus introduction, etc to write. We are looking at mid-March for an availability date.
There should be a pre-release item up on Amazon soon. I'll let you know when that appears.
~Kalen