Acknowledgments

We would like to thank O'Reilly, our favorite publisher, for their trust in us and their investment in our project. Particularly, many thanks to Gigi Estabrook, our first editor, who had the courage and vision to start this project and bring us together. Robert Denn picked it up, when Gigi decided to pursue other challenges in her life. He gave us space and time to develop our ideas and brought this project to a successful end.

Invaluable comments from Wayne Snyder, Kevin Kline, and Baya Pavliashvili, our tech reviewers, improved this text. They found mistakes that we had missed even after we had read each chapter several times. They also provided several good suggestions for clarifying the text.

From Ales

I hope that this book will complement the existing opuses of outstanding authors like Joe Celko, David Rozenshtein, Anatoly Abramovich, Eugine Birger, Iztik Ben-Gan, Richard Snodgrass, and others. I spent many nights studying their work, and I learned almost everything I know from their books. As I'm writing these lines, I'm aware that for every night I spent discovering their secrets, they must have spent 10 nights putting their knowledge into a consistent and readable form. It is an honor to be able to give something back to the SQL community.

This book could never have happened without Jonathan. In the beginning, I was looking for somebody who could correct my English and reshape the text into a readable form. However, after reading the first few pages from him, I knew I had hit the jackpot. Jonathan is an outstanding SQL expert. What seemed, in the beginning, a fairly straightforward read-and-reshape-into-proper-English task became the full-sized burden of creating a new book. We constantly exchanged ideas and new recipes. I am proud to have him as a coauthor and even prouder to gain a new friend. In his first email he sent me, he had a line in the signature, which I'll probably remember for the rest of my life: "Brighten the Corner Where You Are." Well, he did. And it tells everything about him.

I would also like to mention a few people who touched my professional life and influenced me significantly one way or another: Tomaz Gaspersic, Primoz Krajnik, Marko Hrcek, Anton Imre, Robert Reinhardt, Professor Sasa Divjak, and Professor Kurt Leube. They were, and still are, my dearest colleagues, friends, and mentors.

I could never have completed this book without my family and, of course, without Helena. She was always there for me. When we went on vacations and I dragged along a suitcase full of books, cables, and a notebook computer, she calmly read her novel. She didn't say a word. Many times when the sun was shining outside and I was staring at the computer, she often came to me: "You have to have a walk!!!!" When she was vacuuming and made me lift my feet to clean under the table, to prevent suffocation from dust pollution, she just gave me a kiss. She didn't say a word. Then in the evenings when sitting in our living room, she always said she believed that everything would be fine. I didn't. She did. She was right. And she was always there.

As I reflect on this project, I'm taken aback by the amount of work involved. Consider this: over 500,000 characters, each retyped at least twice, 2 years of writing, uncountable hours and nights spent over it. This works out to about 1,300 characters typed each day. The smallest revision number (the number of times a chapter has been revisited, reread, and changed) is 8, and the largest, 14. Conservatively speaking, we had to reread an average chapter 10 times before we were happy with it. This sums to 5 million characters read. A huge burden to go through — 2 years of dedicated work by two experts — and yet, in computer terms, only 500 KB read 10 times over. Having finished such a project, and after doing the previous calculations, I find it fascinating how easily we, in the database industry, talk about megabytes, gigabytes, and terabytes. And yet, in the end, it feels good to do such an exercise once in a while. It makes one humble; it made us better.

From Jonathan

I'd like to start off by thanking Ales for bringing me into his project to write this Transact-SQL Cookbook. Ales is an excellent programmer, and I learned a lot from him while collaborating on this book. Most of the recipes in this book are in fact his, though I did manage to contribute a few of my own.

I also wish to thank my neighbor and good friend Bill Worth for loaning me his copy of How to Lie With Statistics so that I could refresh my memory as to the difference between modes, medians, and means.

Finally, as always is the case with my books, I owe a great debt to my family for putting up with my long hours researching, writing, and experimenting. My wife Donna especially deserves my thanks not only for being more supportive of my writing career than I can possibly deserve, but for her consistent support during the many career vicissitudes that I've experienced during my lifetime.

There's an interesting anecdote I'd like to share from back when this book first got started. Ales is from Slovenia, and I'm from Michigan. When I was first contacted about this book, it so happened that I was vacationing in the small town of Baraga in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The town is named after Bishop Frederic Baraga, a well-known Slovenian priest who traveled and ministered widely along the Lake Superior shoreline in the mid-1800s. Because he often made winter journeys of up to 60 miles on foot, Father Baraga became widely known as the "Snowshoe Priest."

In addition to his work as a missionary, Father Baraga became fluent in the local language and wrote the first English-Ojibwa Dictionary and Grammar; a work that is still in use today. With that, he invented written language for the Ojibwa and preserved their language forever. He also wrote a book about the history and life of native tribes in which he describes the story of a native girl who saved the life of Englishman John Smith. 150 years later she became a movie star. Her name was Pocahontas.

Learn more about Father Baraga and his influence on Michigan's north country by visiting http://www.exploringthenorth.com/bishopb/shrine.html.

As if the coincidence of my being in Baraga, Michigan at the beginning of this project wasn't enough, I actually moved to Michigan's Upper Peninsula during the course of this book. Settling in Munising, I found myself a mere 24 miles from the town of Traunik (http://www.traunik.com), home to a thriving Slovenian community for many years during the early and mid-1900s. Having Ales as a coauthor, Traunik as a neighbor, and living under the shadow of Father Baraga makes me feel strongly connected to this tiny country of Slovenia, which perhaps someday I'll even be lucky enough to visit.