Book Image

SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices

By : Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr. Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H. Mala, Leslie Andrews, Chi Zhang
5 (1)
Book Image

SQL Query Design Patterns and Best Practices

5 (1)
By: Steve Hughes, Dennis Neer, Dr. Ram Babu Singh, Shabbir H. Mala, Leslie Andrews, Chi Zhang

Overview of this book

SQL has been the de facto standard when interacting with databases for decades and shows no signs of going away. Through the years, report developers or data wranglers have had to learn SQL on the fly to meet the business needs, so if you are someone who needs to write queries, SQL Query Design and Pattern Best Practices is for you. This book will guide you through making efficient SQL queries by reducing set sizes for effective results. You’ll learn how to format your results to make them easier to consume at their destination. From there, the book will take you through solving complex business problems using more advanced techniques, such as common table expressions and window functions, and advance to uncovering issues resulting from security in the underlying dataset. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll have a foundation for building queries and be ready to shift focus to using tools, such as query plans and indexes, to optimize those queries. The book will go over the modern data estate, which includes data lakes and JSON data, and wrap up with a brief on how to use Jupyter notebooks in your SQL journey. By the end of this SQL book, you’ll be able to make efficient SQL queries that will improve your report writing and the overall SQL experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Refining Your Queries to Get the Results You Need
6
Part 2: Solving Complex Business and Data Problems in Your Queries
11
Part 3: Optimizing Your Queries to Improve Performance
14
Part 4: Working with Your Data on the Modern Data Platform

Handling JSON Data in SQL Server

JSON data has been around for a long time. It is the preferred format for mobile and application data. Application developers love JSON because of its flexibility and overall ease of use. Application tools such as .NET have a significant amount of built-in functionality to support this technology.

It is this very flexibility that brings us to handling JSON data in SQL Server. By its very nature, JSON is not relational nor is it tabular. This means typical SQL support for working with JSON does not exist as we normally view it. In this chapter, we will be introducing you to the functionality within SQL Server that supports the production and consumption of JSON.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Introducing the JSON functionality built into SQL Server (and some of its limitations)
  • Using JSON SQL functionality to build JSON-formatted results from our database
  • Using JSON SQL functionality to shape JSON data into...