Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft® SQL Server T-SQL in 10 Minutes

Lesson 22. Programming with T-SQL

Although T-SQL is not a general-purpose programming language, it does support programming constructs such as variables and conditional processing. Because these will be used in the next few lessons, this lesson introduces these T-SQL programming concepts.

Understanding T-SQL Programming

All of the SQL statements used thus far have been single standalone statements: SELECT statements to retrieve data, ALTER TABLE statements to make table changes, and so on. But some data-retrieval tasks are more complex, often involving multiple statements, conditional processing, and mid-process data manipulation.

T-SQL is not a general-purpose programming language, but it does support some basic ...