When i first came face-to-face with a real relational database engine (Sybase) in the early 1990s, I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I was accustomed to FoxPro and its built-in database, and a relational database driven from a Unix command line didn't have many attractions. It took a while for me to realize just how powerful this new paradigm was.
Today, SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle, and other relational databases have proved their worth beyond doubt. I simply can't imagine building an enterprise- level application without Structured Query Language (SQL), stored procedures, triggers, constraints, and all of the other database development aids. There are even claims that the next version of SQL Server will allow stored procedures to be written using any .NET language and then executed within the CLR.
As an increasing amount of business and data transformation logic comes to live in stored procedures, and these stored procedures become more complex and have multiple execution paths, it's important to be able to trace exactly what's happening in the depths of your SQL code. Although it's taken a while for the debugging tools to catch up with the development tools, Visual Studio .NET finally brings a grown-up debugger to SQL Server development.