Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATE
This post continues our look at date and time data types in SQL Server. SQL Server 2008 introduced new data types to handle dates and times in a more intelligent way than the DATETIME and SMALLDATETIME…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: SMALLDATETIME
Last week I spoke about a world wary data type for storing dates and times in a single column, with a granularity of three milliseconds, DATETIME. But let’s say you don’t need that kind of…
Dates and Times in SQL Server: DATETIME
Last year I ran a series of posts about Database Fundamentals. Over the next few weeks, I will cover the basics of various date and time data types in SQL Server, when to use them,…
Speaking at SQLSaturday 725 in Victoria
Victoria is on an island off the coast of Vancouver, British Columbia. The island is wisely called Vancouver Island. It is beautiful there, and I wouldn’t mind retiring there someday. Those of you who listen…
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…
How to write a DELETE query
My First DELETE Statement Here are the links to the previous posts in this series: My First SELECT Statement My First INSERT Statement My First UPDATE Statement This week is a much shorter post, where…
How to write an UPDATE query
My First UPDATE Statement Last week we covered how to put information into a table using an INSERT statement. This week we will learn how to make changes to data that is already in a…
How to write an INSERT query
My First INSERT Statement Last week we covered how to get information out of a table, using a SELECT query. This week, we will discover some of the myriad ways to put data into a…
How to write a SELECT query
My First SELECT Statement Microsoft SQL Server makes it really easy for us to query tables. In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for instance, we can right-click on any table we have access to and…
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…
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:…
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.
Fundamentals of Data Types
Last week, we discussed storing text in a database. This week we will dive deeper into data types. When storing data in our database, we want to make sure that it’s stored accurately and that…
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…
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,…
- « Previous
- 1
- 2