Summary

In this chapter, you've been taken on a whirlwind tour of the new CLR integration features of SQL Server 2005. You've seen how to create stored procedures, user-defined types, and user-defined functions within SQL Server 2005 using the new Visual Studio 2005 "SQL Server Project" template. You also learned that T-SQL is still the fastest way to retrieve data from the database, and now CLR languages are the fastest way to perform complex logic and otherwise computationally expensive operations.

Also, you saw how to use the new SQL Server library for data access on the server side, including the SqlContext and SqlPipe classes. Finally, you were introduced to yet another new feature of SQL Server 2005 that is of interest to C# developers: MARS. MARS allows you to create and iterate through multiple active result sets at any given time on the same connection. This new feature is not without penalty, however, because the server execution of these commands is interleaved and you need to be wary of this before overutilizing MARS.