Foreword


Data has been an integral part of business for decades. But the advent of the Internet, the increasing rate of innovation in technology, and the emergence of corporate governance has placed data center stage in the new Millennium. The Internet opened a new window to the world. It broke down barriers and dissolved national and geographic boundaries. As people established ways to leverage the Internet for business, companies found themselves competing in a new arena. Enterprises realized that they no longer had a corner on the market "in their area." The Internet did away with areas and dissolved the advantage of location for many sectors of the economy. A customer could easily reach across the world to a competitor with the click of a hyperlink. This phenomenon catapulted business into a new generation of fierce competition: Competition ripe with the need for competitive advantage over rivals. Out of this, data emerged as the new golden asset within corporations. What companies know about their customers, vendors, supply chain, operations, and markets is often the single most advantageous factor they can bring to bear as they strive for success over their competitors.

Unfortunately, it came to light recently that others were willing to go beyond the rules in their effort to win out over their competition. Scandals made front page news, investors demanded change, and governments responded with legislation. These new bills and regulations have intensified the spotlight on the data within a company. Laws now dictate that data must be available and must meet new levels of accuracy, quality, and integrity. Data must be verifiable and it must be recoverable. Technology has responded to support these new requirements. Faster and more robust hardware and software continue to be produced at an ever-increasing rate. But technology in and of itself is a double-edge sword. While it has provided the means to meet much of the requirements this new global marketplace requires, technology has also introduced new challenges. Because of technology innovations, data can now be produced and stored at staggering speeds. Long gone are the days when a data analyst could review a spreadsheet of data visually and find an error. The data volumes of today freeze the analysts of old in their tracks. What they would have thought a large volume of data can now be stored on a small handheld device and may have been generated in the blink of an eye. The amount of data that must be captured, manipulated, and retrieved each day within companies has reached terabytes and even petabytes in certain scientific sectors. Those responsible for this data, and the data systems, are faced with the challenge of safekeeping what may be an enterprise's most valuable asset.

Fortunately, tools exist for meeting this challenge head-on. One such tool has been at the heart of my professional career; Transact-SQL, or T-SQL. Woven throughout data's lifecycle is the need to transact business and capture data-states, to build data structures, to store data, to retrieve it, sort it, manipulate it, aggregate it, present it . . . on and on. T-SQL provides a means to meets these needs and has sustained itself as a powerful and robust language for data definition and data manipulation. The book you have in your hands holds the key to starting down the path of T-SQL use. I encourage you to do more than read this book; study it. If you do, you will undoubtedly find many of the uses for T-SQL that I have. T-SQL has provided me with the means to create the databases that have been core to applications I've developed. It has provided me with the means to create tools for managing hundreds of other databases across the U.S., the UK, and Japan. And it has provided core functionality for transactional and analytical applications supporting some of the top sites on the Internet. There is a lot of power in the T-SQL language. I hope you find the spark of interest to work through this book in its entirety and add T-SQL to your set of skills. It will help equip you to meet the ever-increasing demands of today's data professionals and will help your company be successful in the new era where data is key to success.

—Matt Estes
Enterprise Information Architect,
The Walt Disney Internet Group




Beginning Transact-SQL with SQL Server 2000 and 2005
Beginning Transact-SQL With SQL Server 2000 and 2005
ISBN: 076457955X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 131
Authors: Paul Turley

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