Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 2: Tools of the Trade
34
Figure 2-9
Note that IntelliSense is new with SQL Server 2008. While they have done a terrific job with it, it is not
without some peculiarities created by the nature of SQL versus other languages. Of particular importance
is what help you can get when you’re adding columns to be selected. We’ll see more about the syntax of
this in later chapters, but SQL syntax calls for column names before the names of the tables those columns
are sourced from. The result is problematic for IntelliSense as, when you are typing your column names,
the tool has no way of knowing what tables you’re trying to get those columns from (and therefore no
way of giving you appropriate hints). If you’re desperate, you can get around this by skipping ahead to
add the table names, then coming back to fill in the column names.
The check-mark icon (Parse) on the SQL Editor toolbar represents another simple debugging item that
quickly parses the query for you without actually attempting to run the statement. If there are any syntax
errors, this should catch them before you see error messages. A debugger is available as another way to
find errors. We’ll look at that in depth in Chapter 12.
Now click the Execute button (with the red exclamation point next to it) on the toolbar. The Query window
changes a bit, as shown in Figure 2-10.
Notice that the main window has been automatically divided into two panes. The top is your original
query text; the bottom is called the results pane. In addition, notice that the results pane has a tab at the
top of it. Later on, after we’ve run queries that return multiple sets of data, you’ll see that we can get
each of these results on separate tabs; this can be rather handy, because you often don’t know how long
each set of data, or result set, is.
The terms result set and recordset are frequently used to refer to a set of data that is
returned as a result of some command being run. You can think of these words as
interchangeable.
Now change a setting or two and see how what we get varies. Take a look at the toolbar above the Query
window and check out a set of three icons, highlighted in Figure 2-11.
These control the way you receive output. In order, they are Results to Text, Results to Grid, and Results
to File. The same choices can also be made from the Query menu under the Results To submenu.