SQL Server Reference Guide

Mar 28, 2003

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You can write a program in one of three modes: procedural, event-driven, or scheduled. The procedural method is based on lines of code starting at the top (however that is indicated) and moving to the next indicated line of code.

Back in the old days, a GW-BASIC language program might look something like this:

10 PRINT "Hi there! I will try to guess your name."
20 DIM N$(50)
30 OPEN "I",1,"NAMES.DAT"
40 INPUT #1, A
50 FOR I=1 TO A
60 LINE INPUT #1,N$(I)
70 NEXT I
80 CLOSE 1
90 N$(0)=STR$(A)
...

Even though the code can move to another line of code, it's still a line-by-line interpretation of programming statements.

Procedural code is still very much with us. Even within the other types of code, lines are interpreted one at a time.

In event-driven code, sections of program code are divided into subroutines or classes. The program doesn't do anything unless some event tells it to do so (such as the user pressing a key or a mouse button). Often, there is a main event, such as opening the first form or a "main" class. These events can kick-off the procedural code inside. Languages including Visual Basic, Java, and C++ are all event-driven.

Strictly speaking, scheduled code is also event-driven, but it's treated differently since the event is always the same: the clock. This kind of programming is sometimes called "batch mode," especially in mainframe and enterprise environments. Scheduled code uses the computer's built-in clock circuitry to order its events.

T-SQL is a bit of all three. SQL Server interprets each line of T-SQL code one at a time. In that way, it's procedural. But SQL Server also has the facilities to respond to events, and one of those events is also a scheduler. In those aspects, SQL Server can be event driven or scheduled.

Today, I'll examine some of the tools you can use to have your system run bits of code based on an event. I'll develop these concepts further in my next article as well, when I'll also cover scheduled programming.

The first tool at our disposal is the trigger. I covered the database trigger in another article, but the long and short of it is that a trigger is a set of code that runs whenever data is added, deleted, or updated in a table.

These types of triggers are certainly the right choice if the event you're looking to respond to is one of those activities. If the event is data related, an instead-of trigger is more useful. (The instead-of trigger defers the insert, update, or delete and instead only runs the code in the trigger.)

Triggers are certainly invaluable in database operations, but when I think of event-level programming, triggers aren't always what I have in mind. Instead of depending on a data event, I want to run another set of code from whichever code I'm currently running.

Stored procedures allow "calling" another stored procedure from within its code. Strictly speaking, this is still procedural code – but since it responds to events that other stored procedures create, we can count it as event-driven.

I'll illustrate this concept with a very simple example. Below you'll find two stored procedures. The first (test1) accepts a single variable: the last name of an author. With that information, this first stored procedure looks up the state that the author lives in.

The test1 procedure then calls another (test2) that uses the output of test1 to find all the authors that live in the same state.

It would be a very simple matter to write this code as a single query, but I'm keeping it simple so that we concentrate on understanding how one stored procedure calls another.

Here's stored procedure number one:

CREATE PROCEDURE test1 (@LastName varchar(30))
AS
DECLARE @State varchar(2)
SELECT @State = state
FROM authors
WHERE au_lname LIKE @LastName
EXEC test2 @State
GO

The first line of the stored procedure sets up the input variable (@LastName). In the third line, I declared a variable to hold the result of a query to get the author's state. That variable is passed to another stored procedure in the seventh line. Here's the "called" stored procedure which returns the final results:

CREATE PROCEDURE test2 (@StateName varchar(2))
AS
SELECT au_fname + ' ' + au_lname, state
FROM authors
WHERE state LIKE @StateName
GO
The following query makes use of these two stored procedures:
EXEC test1 'White'
GO
---------------------------

Johnson White	CA
Marjorie Green	CA
Cheryl Carson	CA
Michael O'Leary	CA
Dean Straight	CA
Abraham Bennet	CA
Ann Dull	CA
Burt Gringlesby	CA
Charlene Locksley	CA
Akiko Yokomoto	CA
Dirk Stringer	CA
Stearns MacFeather	CA
Livia Karsen	CA
Sheryl Hunter	CA
Heather McBadden	CA

This is quite a trivial example, but it does the trick. In database programming parlance, this is called a "nested stored procedure", since one stored procedure is called from another.

You can "nest" these stored procedures up to 32 levels deep. You can find out where you are with this command:

SELECT @@NESTLEVEL

To be stricter about the definition of event-level programming, the system needs to "listen" for events to occur and then respond to them. SQL Server does provide a means for that type of behavior in T-SQL by "alerts" and "jobs." (Next week I'll focus more on those objects and how you can use them to wire up some fairly complex event logic.)

In the articles on SQL Server programming, I haven't covered programming against SQL Server's object model using other languages. This model is available by including or referencing the SQL Server libraries or DLLs in code such as Visual Basic or C#. That type of programming is covered elsewhere at InformIT. Other authors explain this type of programming, which has inherent support for true object oriented and event-level programming. Check out the .NET articles by Jim Mischel, C++ by Danny Kalev, and Java by Steven Haines. Several other articles and books are available at InformIT that explain programming with other languages and platforms.

Online Resources

John Papa has a great article on Microsoft's MSDN site regarding SQL Server triggers.

InformIT Tutorials and Sample Chapters

Dan Fox has a good book on Safari that covers Visual Basic programming and events.

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