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…
SQL Server Management Studio v17.0
Version numbers are confusing. SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), the client user interface by which most DBAs access SQL Server, was decoupled from the server product for SQL Server 2016. For the last 18 months…
SQL Server 2017 Announced
By now you will have heard that the next version of SQL Server has been announced. There’s no release date yet, but Brent Ozar seems to think it’ll be before June. There are many new features,…
Something something Production something something you idiot
You’re reading this series of posts because you want to learn about databases and how to use them. What you should not be doing is learning about databases and how to use them, while working…
Upcoming SQLSaturdays in Alberta, Canada
Taking a short break from the Database Fundamentals series of the last few weeks, I’d like to mention some upcoming PASS community events in the province of Alberta. I will be presenting at SQLSaturday #594…
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:…
Normalization, The Sequel
If there’s one thing that SQL Server is really good at, it’s relationships. After all, a relational database management system without the relationships is nothing more than a place to store your stuff. Last week…
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,…
Max Server Memory and SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1
(This post was last updated on 1 August 2022.) Everything changed for SQL Server Standard Edition on 16 November 2016, and how memory limits work. On that day, a slew of Enterprise Edition features made…