Who Should Read This Book

When we began working with SQL Server, reference materials relating to the development and deployment of stored procedures were rare and not particularly helpful. These materials described basic concepts, but the examples presented were often trivial and not complex enough to be applied to real-world situations in which aspects such as error handling, debugging, naming conventions, and interfaces to other applications are critical. As the legions of application developers and development DBAs migrate from Microsoft Access to SQL Server, and as SQL Server becomes the RDBMS of choice for mission-critical application development, the need for more advanced work on SQL Server stored procedures becomes even more critical.

This book has been written to fill this gap, and thus it has been written with a wide audience in mind. Ideally, it will be neither the first nor the last book you read on SQL Server, but it may be the one you refer to and recommend the most. Above all, this book has been written to help professional developers get the most out of SQL Server stored procedures and produce quality work for their clients.

If you are an experienced SQL Server developer, you will find this book to be an essential reference text full of tips and techniques to help you address the development issues you encounter in the course of your day-to-day development activities.

If you have some experience with SQL Server development, but substantially more in other programming environments such as Visual Basic .NET or C#, you will find this book useful as a tool to orient yourself within the SQL Server environment and become proficient more quickly with SQL Server stored procedure concepts and methods. You will also appreciate the third part of the book about development of stored procedures and other database objects using SQLCLR and .NET programming languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C#. SQLCLR stored procedures are not replacement for Transact-SQL stored procedures, but complementary technology that will help you extend functionality and sometimes improve performance in areas that Transact-SQL is not designed for (such as string manipulation, complex calculations or access to external components).

If you are a novice SQL Server developer, the concepts, tips, and techniques you will learn in reading this book and working through the exercises will help you attain the knowledge, skills, and good habits that will make you an accomplished professional.

We hope that this book remains close to your workstation for a long time. Indeed, in the course of this book's useful life, you may in turn be all three of the users just described.