15
Manipulating Large Data Sets

CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVES

15.01 Manipulate Data Using Subqueries

15.02 Describe the Features of Multitable INSERTs

15.03 Use the Following Types of Multitable INSERTs: Unconditional, Conditional, and Pivot

15.04 Merge Rows in a Table

15.05 Track the Changes to Data over a Period of Time

Two-Minute Drill

Q&A Self Test

This chapter looks at a variety of features and operations that are useful for working with large groups of data. Many of these features combine SQL statements we’ve already reviewed, but in this chapter we look at new combinations of these features, and new keywords and clauses to broaden capabilities and combine tasks into a single SQL statement. The result is more flexibility and power, as well as more efficient performance in your production code. The operations we’ll review here include additional features to the INSERT statement, so that you can use one INSERT statement to add multiple rows of data to a given table, or to several tables, with and without conditional logic. We’ll look at the SQL statement MERGE. We’ll see how to creat....