6 The Mighty SELECT Statement
The fantasy element that explains the appeal of dungeon-clearing games to many programmers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without user requirements changing.—Thomas L. Holaday
As I said in Chapter 1, the SELECT statement is the workhorse of the Transact-SQL language. It does everything from assign variables to return result sets to create tables. Across all versions of SQL, SELECT is the Ginsu knife of the language. There was even a time when it was used to clear certain server error conditions in Sybase’s version of SQL Server (using a function called LCT_ADMIN()).
While it’s handy to be able to ...
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