Part III: Procedures and Triggers

Congratulations on finishing your second week! The third and final week will teach you how to write stored procedures and triggers. It also goes beyond syntax to prepare you for the real world of T-SQL programming. On Days 15 through 17, you will focus on stored procedures, which are T-SQL batches stored on the server that you can execute by name. On Days 18 and 19, you will learn how to write and test triggers.

On Day 15, "Writing and Executing Stored Procedures," you will learn the basic concepts of how to write and execute a simple stored procedure.

Then, on Day 16, "Optimizing Stored Procedures," you will see how to optimize a stored procedure so that they will run more efficiently.

On Day 17, "Debugging Stored Procedures," you will learn how to test and debug a stored procedure that you are creating.

On Day 18, "Writing and Testing Triggers," and Day 19, "Solving Special Trigger Problems," you will learn how to write and test triggers. These are special stored procedures that are fired automatically by the server whenever you make a change to a row in a table by using one of the following commands: INSERT , UPDATE , or DELETE .

On Day 20, "User-Defined Functions in SQL," you will learn about a new feature available in SQL Server 2000 that will enable you to define your own functions that can be used in SQL.

Day 21, "Handling BLOBs in T-SQL," deals with a special data type called BLOBs. These are large binary objects that are stored in a column of a table. You will learn how to work with and modify BLOBs using SQL scripts.