About the Code

The main purpose of this book is to explain concepts and ways of solving problems in Transact-SQL. Some recipes might seem superficial and unnecessary; however, they are important for demonstration purposes.

The code is often fragmented. We strongly encourage you to try to understand its purpose before you use it in production code. There is almost no error-handling included. We wanted to convey each idea as clearly as possible.

We wrote the recipes from a programmer's perspective and do not include a DBA's viewpoint. We don't want anyone to use this book as the sole source of information for their SQL systems. Delivering a proper database system is much more than just programmer's work, which should be clear to anyone in the business. Programmers, designers, and DBAs should work together to design databases properly, program code, and adjust indices and other mechanisms to deliver optimum performance.

This book is an attempt to assist SQL programmers and to bring another experienced view into perspective. Most of the recipes have been tried in practice in real-world systems, and the recipes work. Other recipes have been added to complete the chapters and the topic; this fact does not diminish their importance.