A Developer’s Guide to SQL Server 2005

Foreword

by Gert E. R. Drapers

THE SQL SERVER landscape has changed dramatically over the years. When I started working on SQL Server in 1988, while still at Ashton-Tate, all we had were the base RDBMS-level functionality inherited from Sybase, no real extensibility, some arcane tools like ISQL and BCP, and a single database access API named DB-Library. You had to write your applications in C, squeeze all memory out of your MS-DOS based client to be able to load the network stack, and enable named pipes so you could communicate with the Intel 80286–based PC running OS/2 with LAN Manager and the Ashton-Tate/Microsoft SQL Server 1.0. Twenty-two TPC-B transactions per minute later, we proved that you could build client-server–based database applications ...