Beginning T-SQL with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008

Nearly all business applications read, store, and manipulate data stored in relational databases. If you use Microsoft SQL Server in any way, you need to learn and use T-SQL,?Microsoft's powerful implementation of the ANSI-standard SQL database query language.

This book teaches all of the basics of T-SQL as it's used with SQL Server 2005 and 2008 databases. The authors, leading T-SQL experts, begin with the essentials of SQL Server that are needed to get the most from T-SQL. They then quickly move on to introduce T-SQL itself, including the core elements of data retrieval, SQL functions, aggregation and grouping, and multi-table queries, and they fully explain transaction processing and data manipulation using T-SQL.

The authors also show you how to create and manage T-SQL programming objects, including views, functions, and stored procedures. They detail how to optimize T-SQL query performance and design queries for real-world business applications. All of the methods and techniques in this book can be used with both Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 databases.

In addition, the book includes a comprehensive set of reference appendices, including T-SQL command syntax, system variables and functions, system stored procedures, information schema views, and FileStream objects.

What you will learn from this book

• How to add, modify, and remove records

• How to query multiple tables

• Ways to use views to modify data

• How to create tools for managing databases using T-SQL

• T-SQL programming techniques using views, user-defined functions, and stored procedures

• Methods for optimizing?query performance

• How to use?SQL Server Reporting Services to visualize T-SQL query results

Who this book is for
This book is for beginning SQL Server developers and administrators who need to learn how to use T-SQL. Basic familiarity with relational databases and a general understanding of?basic SQL functions is necessary.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.