Like their database competitors, IBM and Oracle, Microsoft supplies online documentation and hardcopy. But the sheer complexity of all the SQL options and the proprietary extensions, plus the undoubted opacity of the official documentation has spawned an independent sideline of books that provide alternative and presumably clearer views of the databases. Ideally, therefore, this book should not exist!

It assumes you already know the theory of SQL and relational databases. But that at times you will be casting around for the precise syntax of a command. So the book emphasises quick easy lookup of commands. Numerous examples are provided in bold font, to help you quickly get there. By contrast, the full syntax of a query is written in regular font, in BNF. [So you need to know BNF, but that is easy.] This may differ from some texts, where the full syntax is visually emphasised instead of its examples. Logically, the latter formulation makes sense. But the pragmatic pedagogy here is actually often more useful. Most of us will understand a few examples far quicker than perusing the abstraction of a full BNF description of a command. A simple display decision. But you may find that this is a nice usability feature that gives the book utility to you.