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Where To From Fundamentals?

The Database Fundamentals series is now done. We started with understanding what a database is, and then spent a little time understanding how databases store text, known as collation. The next step was understanding data… Where To From Fundamentals?

Querying a Database

When we want to retrieve information from a database, we query the structure with language appropriate to the database. Remember right at the start of this series we saw that a database could be a… Querying a Database

So, like, what is a byte?

A friend of mine in the filmmaking business, who is exceedingly bright but has never worked with SQL Server before, was reading through the first five posts of this Database Fundamentals series, and asked a great question:… So, like, what is a byte?

A First Look At Normalization

Phew! There’s a lot to take in with data types, collation, precision, scale, length, and Unicode, and we’re just getting warmed up. This week’s post is over 2,000 words long!

Over the last three weeks, we’ve gone fairly deep into data types, and now we are going to see how they come into play with normalization.

If we go back to the first post in this series, I mentioned normalization, and then apparently I forgot about it in the next two posts. What you didn’t see is that I was talking about it all along.

A First Look At Normalization

Data Types and Collation

Last week we started with a very simple definition of a database: a discrete set of information, with a specific structure and order to it. We briefly looked at normalization, which is a way to… Data Types and Collation

What is a Database?

What is Microsoft SQL Server? To answer that, we have to ask what a relational database management server (RDBMS) is. To answer that, we have to ask what a relational database is. To answer that,… What is a Database?