Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Programming

Appendix C. The Basics

As I mentioned back in the introduction of this book, I've gone even more towards the idea of fully separating the Beginning and Professional titles into their own pair. My hope is that, between the two, we'll be back at the full compendium we had in my first two books (before the content grew so large that it couldn't fit in a single book). That said, I recognize that many more advanced developers aren't going to be comfortable buying a book with "Beginning" in the title, but may still want to easily look up, review, or make some other kind of study of some of the more extended syntax of an otherwise basic context. If you are one of those people, then this appendix is for you. The idea is simple here: Provide syntax information and, in some cases (and not in others), see some basic examples of the statement in use. There will be no fanfare here, and anywhere from no real description to relatively minor discussion of key concepts. Several hundred pages in the Beginning book that is the companion of this one will be shrunk down to tens of pages here.

There are a few places where I'll provide just a little "extra" coverage (still pretty minimal). Such coverage will generally be limited to "beginning" commands that may not have existed until recent releases, or other places where changes have been such that you might make a different choice today than you've gotten used to using from having learned in "the olden days."

Everything to Do with Queries

In this section, ...