In Review

This chapter examines some of SQL Server’s advanced features. We investigated its locking capability and examined how SQL Server excels for concurrent access and transaction processing. We also discussed how for the most part programming against SQL Server does not require you to explicitly manage locks, isolation levels and transactions or result sets. For advanced functionality and powerful control, however, you can take over the locking, isolation levels and transaction mechanisms from the DBMS.

We also touched on cursors. These are server-maintained result sets that can be accessed by clients one row at a time. There are several types of cursors, but the SQL Server cursor is the most convenient to work with, and while the subject of cursors is still very complex, creating and working with a cursor is not rocket science.

We also covered a little SQL Server XML support (well a little more than a little). There, is so much to this area that there will be many articles, books, arguments, and so on written on the topic.