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

Technical requirements

To work with the examples and illustrations in this chapter, you will need to have Azure Data Studio installed. We will be working with the WideWorldImporters database on SQL Server or Azure SQL Database. Please refer to the Appendix for tool installation and database restoration guidance.

You can find the code for this chapter on GitHub: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/SQL-Query-Design-Best-Practices/tree/main/Chapter11

In this chapter, we will also be looking at some of the latest JSON functions available in SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL Database. To get the most value out of this chapter, it is recommended that you use SQL Server 2022 or Azure SQL Database to run the examples. The remaining JSON functions work with SQL Server 2016 and above.