Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

What's New for T-SQL in SQL Server 2000

SQL Server 7.0 was a significant upgrade from SQL Server 6.5 in terms of the new features available in Transact-SQL. SQL Server 2000 doesn't really provide many new Transact-SQL features over what was available in 7.0. It has a few new datatypes, the ability to create user-defined functions, and the ability to create indexed views.

New Datatypes

SQL Server 2000 introduces three new datatypes:

• bigint

• sql_variant

• table

The bigint Datatype

The bigint datatype is an 8-byte integer that holds integer (whole number) values from –2⁶³ (–9,223,372,036,854,775,808) through 2^63-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807). The bigint datatype is intended for use when integer values would exceed the range of the int datatype and can ...