bull; Written by acknowledged experts, with unprecedented cooperation from Microsoft bull; The next version of SQL Server will be the biggest change in years, and there is a great deal of intense interest in what exactly those changes will be bull; This will enable developers to start working with the beta, so they will be ready once the final product is available

After my last book,Essential ADO.NET, was handed in to the publisher ten days before .NET 1.0 shipped, I swore I'd never write another. To keep up with a technology while it was developing and the product features were being refined on an almost daily basis was too big an energy sink. Then, less than a year later, I caught wind of a new version of SQL Server, code-named Yukon. As with each version of SQL Server before it,since Microsoft's original 4.21 offering, there were lots of features for DBAs--high-availability features, tuning features, scalability features, andso on. A new, fast-growing field calledbusiness intelligencewas being developed,and SQL Server was on the cusp of this. The features in this business intelligence area of Yukon were truly astounding. But the biggest changes that caught my eye were those in the developer area. I was hooked. Transact-SQL has served us developers well all these years and continues to work quite well, thank you. This book lists the enhancements to this procedural dialect of SQL, and that chapter ended up to be much longer (because of the number of enhancements) than I originally thought. In the last few years, I'd been spending a lot of time in the XML space and done a lot of thinking about the differences and similarities between the XML and relational models. I liked the formal W3C standardization process for XML, slow as it seems at times. I started to investigate the ANSI SQL standards in earnest, though I'd read them before, and realized that SQL has a rich and deep foundation, starting with SQL-86 and up to the last mainstream standard, SQL-92, and past that to SQL:1999. But in 2002 there were specifications in progress to define how XML would be integrated into a relational database. There was a synergy with the XML work I'd been doing lately. I heard there would be XML functionality in Yukon, including an XML data type, XML schema validation, and an implementation of the emerging standard query language for XML, XQuery. In addition, beginning with the object-oriented graphical user interface on the NeXT computer, I'd spent a lot of the last ten years using object-oriented techniques. And Yukon promised to integrate the .NET runtime into the database engine itself. Not that SQL Server internals were to be written in .NET, but that .NET would be directly accessible as a language for stored procedures and user-defined functions. I could use object-oriented programming techniques with my database programming as well. This might be a big assist to the procedural programming in T-SQL I was already doing, in those cases where I needed it. I'd read about using object-oriented languages in the ANSI SQL specifications. Finally, there was the rumor that .NET classes might be available in SQL Server as types that the server knew about. I'd read the ANSI spec for that too. I justhadto see this product. So we had been working on writing this book since late 2002 when I met with Eric Brown in Redmond, Washington, and we got the OK and the software. Since 2002 we'd badgered the SQL Server and Webdata teams with copious questions about not only how the software worked but why it was designed that way. They were very understanding about our persistence,but sometimes I felt that I was being a bit of a pest. When we started to teach the class in earnest, we tried to pay them back with information about how software vendors and others thought the features would be useful. At that time, Niels and I were writing, and Dan was reviewing and making suggestions; however, Dan got hooked too. We almost published in the beta 1 time frame, but held back. There were too many major enhancements to the way things actually worked, and we'd written about how things worked too early. Readers would think things worked the old way instead of the improved way. And there were more enhancements coming in beta 2. We held off writing and went for another revision. We were perm