Itzik Ben-Gan - T-SQL Fundamentals (Developer Reference)

Itzik Ben-Gan

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A number of people contributed to making this book a reality, either directly or indirectly, and deserve thanks and recognition. Its certainly possible I omitted some names unintentionally, and I apologize for this ahead of time.

To Lilach: Youre the one who makes me want to be good at what I do. Besides being my inspiration in life, you always take an active role in my books, helping to review the text for the first time. In this book, you took a more official technical editing role, and I cant appreciate enough the errors you spotted, and the many ideas and suggestions for improvements.

To my siblings, Mickey and Ina: Thank you for the constant support and for accepting the fact that Im away.

To Davide Mauri, Herbert Albert, Gianluca Hotz, and Dejan Sarka: Thanks for your valuable advice when I reached out asking for it.

To the editorial team at Pearson and related vendors. Loretta Yates, many thanks for being so good at what you do and for your positive attitude! Thanks to Charvi Arora for all your hard work and effort. Also, thanks to Songlin Qiu, Scout Festa, Karthik Orukaimani, and Tracey Croom for sifting through all the text and making sure its polished.

To my friends from Lucient, Fernando G. Guerrero, Herbert Albert, Fritz Lechnitz, and many others. Weve been working together for over two decades, and its been quite a ride!

To members of the Microsoft SQL Server development team, Umachandar Jayachandran (UC), Conor Cunningham, Kevin Farlee, Craig Freedman, Kendal Van Dyke, Derek Wilson, Davide Mauri, Bob Ward, Buck Woody, and Im sure many others. Thanks for creating such a great product, and thanks for all the time you spent meeting with me and responding to my emails, addressing my questions, and answering my requests for clarification.

To Aaron Bertrand, who besides being one of the most active and prolific SQL Server pros I know, does an amazing job editing the sqlperformance.com content, including my articles.

To Data Platform MVPs, past and present: Erland Sommarskog, Aaron Bertrand, Hugo Kornelis, Paul White, Alejandro Mesa, Tibor Karaszi, Simon Sabin, Denis Reznik, Tony Rogerson, and many othersand to the Data Platform MVP lead, Rie Merritt. This is a great program that Im grateful for and proud to be part of. The level of expertise of this group is amazing, and Im always excited when we all get to meet, both to share ideas and just to catch up at a personal level.