Today I am finally getting around to the review of the first chapter as promised. I talked about the book a bit in the first post on the subject, which can be found here. This book was written by Alex Kuznetsov (blog).
In this chapter, Alex discusses some basic defensive programming techniques. That, in fact, is essentially the name of the chapter. This is a pretty lengthy chapter – and with good reason. Alex is laying the groundwork in this chapter with some basic samples and pretty much giving an introduction to the book. The code samples are straight forward and designed to illustrate his point quite well.
During my current reading, a good takeaway from this chapter is the discussion on Rowcount. For me, it serves as a prime reminder of the deprecation status as of SQL Server 2008. If you are using SET ROWCOUNT, stop and change your practices. Alex suggests using TOP in lieu of SET ROWCOUNT.
With each case that Alex presents as a potential problem when building your SQL code, he offers up a solution on how to avoid that problem. The composition of using problems and providing solutions is quite handy.
And in Alex’s own words (Chapter 1 Summary, Page 59)
