The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL

The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL
by Ken Henderson
Copyright 2000
Addison-Wesley

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Whether you are a DBA, SQL Server developer, or any developer who writes code that accesses SQL Server, learning Transact-SQL is an important job requirement. While it is possible to put off learning Transact-SQL for a little while, eventually you will need to master it if you hope to excel using SQL Server.

This book, The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL, offers a lucid, fast-paced, comprehensive, and mostly technical guide to how to get the most out of Transact-SQL on SQL Server. It also includes hundreds of useful code examples and covers many undocumented features about Transact-SQL that I have not seen before. Throughout the book, the author describes ways to boost the performance of your Transact-SQL applications, and this is in addition to a full chapter dedicated to performance tuning. The topics covered by this book include:

• Introductory Transact-SQL

• Transact-SQL Data Type Nuances

• Missing Values

• DDL Insights

• DML Insights

• The Mighty SELECT Statement

• Views

• Statistical Functions

• Runs and Sequences

• Arrays

• Sets

• Hierarchies

• Cursors

• Transactions

• Stored Procedures and Triggers

• Transact-SQL Performance Tuning

• Administrative Transact-SQL

• Full-Text Search

• OLE Automation

• Undocumented T-SQL

When I first ran across this book, I assumed the word "Guru" in its title meant that this book was targeted only for advanced Transact-SQL developers. This is not really the case. While I would not recommend it for the person who has virtually no experience with Transact-SQL and are looking for a beginning tutor, I do recommend it for everyone else who needs to learn Transact-SQL. If you already have experience with SQL Server from an administrative capacity, and know the basics of Transact-SQL, I think you will find this a very rewarding book to own and read. I highly recommend this book.