Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

Chapter 3. Basic T-SQL

Well, here we are still in review time. In this chapter, we will take a whirlwind tour of the most fundamental Transact-SQL (or T-SQL) statements. As with all of the first few chapters of this book, we will be mostly assuming that you know a lot of this story already — so the goal here is to provide review material plus set you up to "fill in the blanks" of your learning.

T-SQL is SQL Server's own dialect of Structured Query Language (or SQL). T-SQL received a bit of an overhaul for this release, with many new programming constructs added. Among other things, it was converted to be a Common Language Runtime (CLR) compliant language — in short, it is a .NET language now. While, for SQL Server 2005 we can use any .NET language to access the database, in the end we're always going to be using some SQL for the root data access, and T-SQL remains our corelanguage for doing things in SQL Server. For purposes of this chapter though, things are pretty much as they always have been — there is very little in the way of changes in this most fundamental statements.

The T-SQL statements that we will learn in this chapter are:

• SELECT

• INSERT

• UPDATE

• DELETE

These four statements are the bread and butter of T-SQL. We'll learn plenty of other statements as we go along, but these statements make up the basis of T-SQL's Data Manipulation Language — or DML. Since you'll, generally, issue far more commands meant to manipulate (that is, read and modify) data than other types of commands ...