Microsoft has been steadily adding support for advanced data types into their database engine, and many developers and database administrators are not fully aware of what these new types can provide in the way of optimization and speeding development time. This book introduces readers to the growing amount of support within SQL Server for operations and data transformations that until now required third-party software and all the associated licensing and development costs. Readers benefit through a better understanding of what can be done inside the database engine with no additional costs or development time invested in outside software.