| Professional SQL Server 2005 Programming shows experienced developers how to master the substantially revamped feature set of the latest release of Microsoft SQL Server. The book begins with a concise overview of the new features of SQL Server that is of interest to experienced developers. This is especially important given the substantial changes to SQL Server with this release. From there, the book quickly moves on to the “meat” of the title. Beginning-level material has been removed to provide more room for covering new features and more extensive code examples.
It’s been a long road indeed. The wait for SQL Server 2005 has been the longest drought between versions since SQL Server was first introduced in the late 1980s. Even the complete rewrite of SQL Server that was accomplished with version 7.0 took only 3 1/2 years (we’ve been waiting on SQL Server 2005 for over five years).
Some things are, however, worth waiting for, and SQL Server 2005 falls squarely in that camp. The number and importance of new or rewritten features is almost staggering. This book is, however, about much more than just “what’s new?”—it is about understanding in a very broad way a product that has grown to one of the largest, most diverse products in the marketplace. Perhaps even more importantly, it is about understanding how to develop systems and applications that both meet your performance needs and store your data in a fashion that maintains integrity of the data while keeping it reasonably usable.
For those of you that have read the previous versions of this book, there have been a few changes this time around. Specifically, the real “beginning” level discussion has been moved into its own Wrox book (Beginning SQL Server 2005 Programming). The beginning topics are still here for sake of completeness, but they have been condensed to be in more of a review model. Why? Well, in the previous version, we had a problem where the size of the book had grown to a point where it could not get any larger and still fit within bindery limits (in short, it wouldn’t have fit in a single cover). Something had to be done, so we made the choice to split it up a bit to allow room for growth in this and future versions. All the beginning materials are still there in a more compact form, but at a much faster pace and, therefore, perhaps more suited for review than for learning from scratch.
Other than that, this book maintains most of the style and variety of content it has always had. We go from the beginning to the relative end. We cover most of the add-on services, as well as advanced programming constructs (such as the highly touted .NET assemblies) and some of the supporting object models (which allow for management of your SQL Server and its various engines). |