What You Will Find in This Book

All chapters in this book  provide conceptual grounding in a specific area of the SQL Server development landscape. Chapters 3 through 12 go beyond this conceptual grounding to provide the techniques and examples to help you realize the concepts within the SQL Server development environment. Chapters 2-7 and 9-12 contain exercises designed to help you apply and develop the skills learned in the chapter. You can find the solutions to the exercises in Appendix B, "Solutions."

Chapter 1, "Introduction," describes the content of this book, as well as its intended audience, and introduces you to new features available in SQL Server 2000. It also describes a sample database that we will use throughout the book to demonstrate stored procedure development.

Chapter 2, "Relational Database Concepts and the SQL Server Environment", provides a 30,000-foot overview that will help you establish a conceptual grounding in Relational relational database management systems (RDBMSs) in general, and in SQL Server architecture in particular. It will briefly introduce the Transact-SQL language, SQL Server tools, and stored procedure design.

Chapter 3, "Stored Procedure Design Concepts", explores SQL Server stored procedure design in greater detail with particular attention paid to the different types of stored procedures, their uses, and their functionality.

Chapter 4, "Basic Transact-SQL Programming Constructs," describes Transact-SQL, the ANSI SQL SQL-92 compliant programming language used to write scripts in SQL Server. This chapter summarizes datatypes, variables, flow control statements, and cursors in the context of SQL Server 2000.

Chapter 5, "Functions", describes the extensive set of built-in functions available in SQL Server 2000 and how to use them in various common situations.

Chapter 6, "Composite Transact-SQL Constructs - Batches, Scripts, and Transactions," describes the various ways in which you can group Transact-SQL statements for execution.

Chapter 7, "Debugging and Error Handling," provides a coherent approach to the identification and resolution of defects in code and a coherent strategy for handling errors as they occur.

Chapter 8, "Developing Professional Habits," discusses the work habits that differentiate the professional DBA from the amateur, particularly source code control and the use of naming conventions.

Chapter 9, "Special Types of Procedures," describes user-defined, system, extended, temporary, global temporary, and remote stored procedures as well as other types of procedures in Transact-SQL such as user-defined functions, table-valued user-defined functions, after triggers, and instead instead-of triggers.

Chapter 10, "Advanced Stored Procedure Programming," introduces some advanced techniques for coding stored procedures such as dynamically constructed queries, optimistic locking using timestamps, and nested stored procedures.

Chapter 11, "Interaction with the SQL Server Environment," focuses on the ways in which you can use system and extended stored procedures to interact with the SQL Server environment, and discusses the ways in which user-defined stored procedures can help you leverage the existing functionality of various elements within the SQL Server environment.

Chapter 12, "XML Support in SQL Server 2000," first introduces XML as the markup language of choice for information exchange and publishing and then focuses on specific features in SQL Server 2000 that you can use to tackle XML.

Appendix A, "T-SQL and XML Data types in SQL Server 2000," provides you with three tables that list data types in use in SQL Server 2000 and the way they map.

Appendix B, "Solutions," provides users with solutions for the exercises that are accompanying the chapters.