20Jun 2017 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Database Fundamentals #3: What’s In a Database?

Database Fundamentals
It’s worth noting that a lot of people will never need to create their own database. You may never create your own tables or other data structures either. You may only ever run backups and restores and manipulate the security on the system and let application installs create databases for you. That’s completely understandable and perfectly in line with the needs of many businesses and many accidental DBAs. However, it's a good idea to understand what this stuff is and how it works as part of understanding SQL Server. A Database Is Actually Files You need to store information that you want to be able to retrieve later. It’s necessary that you organize that information. If you were working with a word processing program, you store different documents in different…
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12Jun 2017 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Database Fundamentals #2: SQL Server Management Studio

Database Fundamentals
The best way to learn any software is to start using it. There are a bunch of software tools in the SQL Server toolbox, but the biggest and most important is SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). SSMS is where you'll spend most of your time when you start to work with SQL Server. It provides a very large series of graphical user interfaces for creating databases, setting up security, reading data out of the database, and all sorts of other things within your SQL Server instances, the databases stored there, and all the stuff inside those databases. It also supplies you with an interface to the basic scripting language of SQL Server, through which you can do almost anything to the server. The scripting language is called Transact Structured Query…
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31May 2017 by Grant Fritchey 7 Comments

Database Fundamentals

Database Fundamentals, Professional Development
One of my favorite things about being a technologist is constantly learning new things, but, this can lead us to forget about the fundamentals. More importantly, in our pursuit of the latest and greatest things, it's very easy for those of us who teach to forget to reach back and pull others forward. With this in mind, I'm going launch a new blog series called Database Fundamentals. Database Fundamentals The goal here is simple. I'm going to talk about the basics. Creating a database. Creating tables.  Inserts, selects, primary keys, and on and on. I have a bunch of material accumulated around these topics. I may as well share it as much as I can. I will continue posting information about all the fun cutting edge stuff I get to…
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