Everywhere you look these days Microsoft SQL Server is there. You hear about dotcom companies running SQL Server and accessing terabytes of data, and applications that need to be scaled up from Access to use SQL Server. You just can't seem to escape the presence of SQL Server in the workplace. SQL Server 2000 is the latest release and, because of performance enhancements and new features, this is a great time to learn how to use SQL Server and how to incorporate it into your applications. Whether you are building VB applications (front-end or back-end) or web applications, if you need data access to SQL Server 2000 this book can help. While most of the book covers accessing SQL Server 2000 from VB, the same principles can be applied to Active Server Pages using VBScript and ADO (Active X Data Objects). This book covers the use of in-line SQL statements and stored procedures, and how to use both in your VB programs and web applications. The new XML features of SQL Server 2000 are also covered - you will learn how to execute queries and stored procedures in the URL of a web browser to retrieve XML data from the database.

XML templates, XSL stylesheets, and XML schemas are also covered, and we show you how to format your XML data into a presentable format for display in a browser.