Pro T-SQL 2008 Programmer's Guide

Introduction

I still recall the first "database" application I ever wrote. It was a Turbo Pascal-based application for state government, designed to keep an inventory of tools and hazardous waste materials for a state institution in the late 1980s. I recall running into a lot of issues, including performance, large data storage, extensibility, and data integrity. I mention this only because these are just the types of problems that modern enterprise-class SQL DBMSs are specifically designed to handle. What's more, they abstract away the internal workings (well, most of them anyway) so that you can concentrate more on your data and less on writing code to manipulate it. As an example, a simple sort algorithm that consumed over 100 lines of code ...