A Developer’s Guide to SQL Server 2005

8. T-SQL Language Enhancements

SQL SERVER 2005 includes new Transact-SQL (T-SQL) functionality. SQL Server 2005 represents a major enhancement to SQL Server. Even if you ignore major additions such as hosting the CLR, Common Language Runtime, in process in SQL Server and support of XML as a first-class native data type, the T-SQL enhancements alone are enough to consider this a major update of SQL Server.

The enhancements span the range from more support of SQL:1999 syntax for SQL to enhanced error handling.

Improvements to Transact-SQL

In brief, the improvements include the following:

• Error handling—TRY/CATCH syntax for handling errors

– INTERSECT and EXCEPT

– TOP—Row count based on an expression

– ON DELETE and ON UPDATE

– APPLY—New JOIN ...