As some of you have noticed my blog has been kind of quiet lately, this is mainly because I've been doing a lot of reading lately and of course it is the holiday season. Well I decided to post some information on a SQL Server 2005 book that I've been reading and contains some good information. The book is called: "Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Programming". There are actually three books in the Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 series, but I found the topics covered in this one to be the most interesting to me so I selected it when chosing which to read first.
Overall I would recommend this book for insightful information on when to use certain aspects of T-SQL in your applications. I haven't completely finished the book yet, but so far it has given some great pointers on things like when to use each of the various types of tables in T-SQL (temporary tables, table variable or derived table/CTE). Some other interesting topics it contains are: pros/cons of executing dynamic SQL within T-SQL, views, UDFs, T-SQL transactions and exception handling. There is also a section on the Service Broker and it gives tips on safe programming using T-SQL to limit potential security holes in your logic.
The other two books in the series are T-SQL Querying (recommended before reading T-SQL Programming) and The Storage Engine. The series is published by Microsoft Press.