Summary

• You can write stored procedures, user-defined functions, aggregates, triggers, and UDTs using managed code hosted by the SQLCLR.

• The SQLCLR does not replace Transact-SQL. Set-based operations are best accomplished using T-SQL, whereas computation-intensive operations are best done using the SQLCLR.

• You must enable the SQLCLR to use it on the SQL Server instance.

• The SqlContext object provides access to the SQLCLR environment. This object has the Pipe property, which sends messages and data to the client.

• The SqlContext object's Pipe property also contains the SendResultsStart, SendResultsRow, and SendResultsEnd methods that are used for sending rowset data back to the client.

• You can write your SQLCLR source code with a text editor, compile it using the command-line compiler, and load and register the SQLCLR code using SQL scripts. Visual Studio .NET provides a developer-friendly interface that simplifies coding, deployment, and debugging.

• You should use the context connection to access data within the current database because the context connection runs in-process and does not use any of the protocol stacks to communicate with the database server.

• You should use a UDT only to define an atomic value that will be viewed in a column, not to represent business objects such as customers and employees.