With the release of a major new version of SQL Server, it's incumbent on developers to take time to refresh and enhance their knowledge of this new version of T-SQL (Transact SQL) and stored procedure programming. The challenge is to find a good book that will cover the highlights but not give you a hernia in the process. Dejan Sunderic's book fits this bill.

The book consists of 21 chapters and three appendices. The first 10 chapters provide a nice review of current and new features of the T-SQL found in SQL Server 2005. There is a review of the new SQL Server environment as well as a discussion of stored procedure design concepts. Each chapter from Chapter 4 through 10 covers an important T-SQL concept such as functions and error handling. You might be very interested in Chapters 11 through 14 because the author walks you through numerous examples of how to develop stored procedures using .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime).

In the final chapters, he covers a lot of material and important topics such as advanced stored procedure programming and using source code control inside Visual Studio to protect your stored procedures. He also covers issues of security. If you've never used a debugger on stored procedures, then you're going to want to read the chapter on debugging, which also contains a clever "poor man's debugger."

I'll admit though that there are one or two areas that disappointed me a bit. For instance, Mr. Sunderic uses his own SQL Server database "Asset5" for many of the examples. I really didn't feel that it added much to the discussion and I would have preferred he used the "AdventureWorks" database instead since that's the new standard demo database that Microsoft provides for SQL Server 2005. Also, while most of his examples are really good, the one on common table expressions didn't really show the power behind this new feature. In fact, when he discusses the row number function, he doesn't touch on the important topic of removing duplicate records in SQL Server. With a combination of common table expressions and the row number function, it's become extremely easy to do this.

The book is a good review of existing T-SQL language concepts and does a good job of covering new features. The book is peppered with Mr. Sunderic's useful insights and observations. If you're looking to find out what's new in T-SQL and stored procedure programming, you'll find this book quite helpful.

Developers Note
To run stored procedures using CLR in SQL Server 2005 you'll need to run the this script against your database:

ALTER DATABASE <database> SET TRUSTWORTHY ON
go
sp_configure 'clr enabled', 1
go
reconfigure
go