Excellent Article with a good overview of develoment features.

I somewhat aggree with Alan too: the examples have typos unless the author did modify his AdventureWorks database.

In the first example in 3.1.1

Select row_number() over (order by SalesOrderDate desc) as RowNum,OrderID, CustomerID, SalesOrderDateFrom Sales.OrderHeaderOrder by SalesOrderDate Desc

Should read:

Select row_number() over (order by OrderDate desc) as RowNum,

SalesOrderID, CustomerID, OrderDate

From Sales.SalesOrderHeader

Order by OrderDate Desc

In the second example in 3.1.2

State.StateProvinceID

should read

StateProv.StateProvinceID

Since I made a mistake myself trying to point to the mistakes in the second example  I guess it is not the author's fault that the names are complex

Is the MERGE INTO .. there at all in the released version???

I searched the whole Books Online, it's nowhere to be found. Besides I tried executing the example given for this it fails.   

Got very frustrated when the examples were not working. MERGE INTO is no longer supported by SQL 2005. Other than that not a bad article.

Just piping in on a something I just noticed in playing with INTERSECTand EXCEPT.  I expected that they would act identicle to EXISTS and NOT EXISTS but they don't.  They treat nulls differently.

Based on the author's example create a quick reference table.

SELECT TOP 1000 CustomerID, OrderDate, SalesPersonID

INTO Sales.SalesOrderHeaderIntersection

FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader

I expected the following two queries to return the same results.

Good Article,However would like to see more articles coming with focus on DBA aspects!

Cheers,

Raghu Pyapili