In this lesson, you will learn how to format the text and numbers.

In our last lesson, we developed a stored procedure that does some pretty cool things. It combines a lot of concepts we've learned thus far and even gives the user some feedback about what's happening. However, there are still some things we could do to make it work a little better.

As you've realized by now, SQL is very different than most programming languages. Most programming languages deal with sets of linear instructions that kick off when something happens. For example, a user clicks a button that says print, a series of commands kick off to print the document. It might also check to see if the printer is on or available before proceeding.

If you know a little bit about SQL server, you might have been wandering why we have not spoke about stored procedures until now. Stored procedures are a powerful way to create reusable packages of SQL code that live in your database. We didn’t get into it earlier because stored procedures are basically just a wrapper for everything we’ve learned so far.

Non-clustered indexes are a very important component in SQL server. We’ve discussed them briefly in a previous chapter. They basically act like an index in the back of a book. They give you a quick shortcut to find data that’s organized in an alternative way. Today, we’ll learn how they work and how SQL utilizes them. This will help us understand where to put them when designing a database.

This lesson will focus on a basic understanding of how the SQL server engine works.

In this lesson, you will learn about temp tables.