What Did We Write and Why?

Many years ago, when Dejan Sunderic was taking his first steps in SQL Server, he looked in vain for a resource to help him learn more about stored procedures. At the time, it was possible to find only two types of books about SQL Server: books for administrators and books about the architecture of SQL Server. Of these two types of books, the latter provided the most detail on stored procedures – but generally not more than 20 to 50 pages. Since that time, there has been no change for the better. Many books have been published with "SQL Server Programming" in their title, but coverage of stored procedures never seemed to exceed 50 pages, and, usually, half of the book would be dedicated to working with database access from Visual Basic, Visual Interdev, and other similar environments. These books are fine as far as they go, but their perspective on SQL Server is simply not suited to the SQL Server developer or DBA.

In May, 1999, Dejan decided to close the gap between what exists and what is needed, and enlisted the help of documentation consultant Tom Woodhead to produce a book on stored procedure development with maximum usability. In October, 1999, the first version of this book, based on SQL Server 7.0, was written. Unfortunately, it was not published immediately, because Microsoft had just announced Shiloh (SQL Server 7.5). A year later, on September 26, 2000, Microsoft officially released SQL Server 2000 (not 7.5 or even 8.0). The authors of this book used two beta versions of Shiloh, one pre-published final version of SQL Server 2000 and one concomitant e-Commerce project to explore this new product, learn its new features, and update the existing book. One week after the official launch of SQL Server 2000 on October 4, 2000, Osborne/McGraw-Hill published "SQL Server 2000 Stored Procedure Programming" as part of its "Database Professional’s Library".