Pro T-SQL Programmer’s Guide, 4th Edition

Introduction

In the mid-1990s, when Microsoft parted ways with Sybase in their conjoint development of SQL Server, it was an entirely different product. When SQL Server 6.5 was released in 1996, it was starting to gain credibility as an enterprise-class database server. It still had rough management tools, only core functionalities, and some limitations that are forgotten today, like fixed-size devices and the inability to drop table columns. It functioned as a rudimentary database server: storing and retrieving data for client applications. There was already plenty for anyone new to the relational database world to learn. Newcomers had to understand many concepts, such as foreign keys, stored procedures, triggers, and the dedicated language, ...