C H A P T E R  10

Selecting and Updating Data

In this chapter, you will see details on how to retrieve data correctly and professionally in a production environment, and this chapter will lay the foundation for more advanced T-SQL in the forthcoming chapters. Up until now, you have witnessed a “lazy” method in that you have returned data from every column and every row in whatever tables you have been querying. This chapter will detail why that is not ideal, and it will demonstrate the correct methods. You will also see how to change column headings so that they provide more meaningful names for non-IT people. Then you will see how to reduce the data brought back by filtering for only the rows you want. The final sections in this chapter on retrieving data will introduce you to some b....