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

Formatting results as JSON in SQL Server

To demonstrate how we want JSON and its usage within SQL, we will be creating a table and inserting JSON into it for use throughout the rest of this chapter. In this section, we will build a query that will generate JSON that can be stored and a couple of tables for illustration and demonstration purposes for extracting JSON data. We will be using FOR JSON and its related options to generate JSON data to be stored in our table.

Throughout the rest of this chapter, we will be working with data from the WideWorldImporters database. If you want to follow along step by step, now is the time to open SQL Server Management Studio or Azure Data Studio, depending on the platform you have decided to use. We recommend that you use Azure Data Studio as it works best with JSON data results. If you only have SQL Server Management Studio available, the results will still be available to you but will be formatted in an XML format as opposed to a JSON format...