Summary

This chapter discussed the programming extensions beyond typical implementations of SQL that make Transact-SQL a specialized programming language. These extensions include control of flow, conditional branching, looping, variables , logical operations, bitwise operations, and a variety of scalar functions. The extensions let you write sophisticated routines directly in Transact-SQL and execute them directly in the SQL Server engine. Without them, much more logic would need to be written into client applications, which would reduce performance because more conversation would need to take place across the network.

Having now discussed in some depth the basics of the SQL language and the Transact-SQL extensions, let's move on to using these extensions in stored procedures and triggers: Chapter 10.