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T-SQL Tutorial For Beginners

Published on May 1, 2013

Welcome back to another beginner tutorial. In my Previous tutorial I have explained you about basic SQL. In this tutorial, I will give you brief about Transact-SQL(T-SQL).

These are some differences as well as similarities between T-SQL and SQL. T-SQL is an enhanced version of SQL. In T-SQL we have SQL along with programming concepts.(SQL + Programming = T-SQL). T-SQL have most of the programming concepts like variables, loops, conditions, etc.. Note: Oracle as has the similar concept known as PL/SQL

1) Variables:

Simply variable is buckets where you can store values. T-SQL support variables. You can use a variable to assign values, change values when you need. In T-SQL variables declare, assign values, retrieving values as below as below.

--Syntex:
---declaration
DECLARE @variable data-type
---Assignment
SET @variable='value'
---Retrieve
SELECT @variable
--Example
DECLARE @MyName varchar(20)
SET @MyName='Aravind'
SELECT @MyName

2) GO

When we execute SQL statement the will execute one by one. But in T-SQL we have a facility to execute a bunch of statement at a time. Known as Batch Execution. The main use of this is performance. Also if any one statement has syntactical error in any one statement, none of the statement will execute.

--example
USE StudentDb
INSERT INTO Student(name,email) VALUES ('aravind','aravind@techumber.com');
SELECT * FROM Student;
GO

3) IF…ELSE

In programming world IF....ELSE is the basic conditional control. Have a look at the below example how we can use IF....ELSE in T-SQL.

DECLARE @temp char(2)
SELECT @temp = Gender
FROM Student
WHERE StudentId=333
IF @temp='M'
PRINT 'Hi Handsome. How are you today?'
ELSE
PRINT 'Hi beautiful. How are you today?'

4) BEGIN…END

BEGIN, END keyword are much like open and close parenthesis we use in high-level programming languages. Mostly we use these in condition statement where we have more than one statement to execute. See the example

IF (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Student WHERE Gender = 'M') > 0
BEGIN
PRINT 'This is a boys college'
PRINT ' '
SELECT fname, lname
FROM Student
END
ELSE
PRINT 'No boys'

5) WHILE

WHILE is used to repeatedly execute statements until the condition became false. There are many advantages of using while in T-SQL. See this example.

DECLARE @counter INT,@total INT
SET @counter=0
SET @total=SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Student WHERE lname="Gates"
WHILE (@counter < @total)
BEGIN
UPDATE Student
SET lname= lname + CAST(@counter as char(2))
WHERE lname="Gates"
SET @counter = @counter+1
END

In this example, we finding all record with the last name as Gates and updating them with count appending to them.

6) CASE

In programming, we use case instead of multiple nested if..else statements. Similarly, we use CASE to evaluate an express whether it is true or false based on it uses specific values.

SELECT latitude , 'For Country' =
CASE
WHEN 'AF' THEN 'Afghanistan'
WHEN 'IN' THEN 'India'
WHEN 'RU' THEN 'Russia'
WHEN 'US' THEN 'United States'
WHEN 'LK' THEN 'Sri Lanka'
END
FROM Country

7) Transactions

Transactions are much like a batch. The only difference between Transaction and batch is we can undo all changes we made by statements within the single translations. We can not do this in Batch. We use COMMIT TRANSACTION or ROLLBACK TRANSACTION statement at the end. If we put ROLLBACK TRANSACTION it will undo all the changes.

BEGIN TRANSACTION
SELECT * FROM Student
......
COMMIT TRANSACTION

8) Stored Procedures

Stored Procedures are a most Important concept in databases. There are many advantages using stored procedures. Mainly performance because sorted procedures are compiled and will be cached after the first time we used it. Another big advantage is we can call stored procedures from programming languages like vb,c#.

CREATE PROCEDURE uspGetStudent
@sname nvarchar(50)
AS
SELECT fname,lname,rolno
FROM Student
WHERE fname = @sname
GROUP BY fname
ORDER BY fname
GO

--Execute stored procedure
EXEC usp 'aravind'
GO

Conclusion

These are very basic concepts of T-SQL. There are some advanced concepts like Views,Triggers,etc…