From the course: SQL Server Fundamentals: Master Basic Query Techniques

What is SQL Server? - SQL Tutorial

From the course: SQL Server Fundamentals: Master Basic Query Techniques

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What is SQL Server?

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- [Instructor] Before we can dive in and write a single line of code, it's important that we cover a few definitions and high level concepts that we are going to need for this course. SQL pronounced as either sequel or S-Q-L, depending on who you're talking to, is an acronym that stands for Structured Query Language. It is a basic English-like programming language that is used to interact with a database. A database is an organized collection of data points stored on a computer. Any information that an organization needs to conduct their affairs is stored in a database of some kind. More specifically, SQL is used for managing a relational database, which is a data storage method that organizes information in a series of tables that are connected through data relationships. We'll be going more in depth with how that works in another video, so don't worry about that too much right now. There are several different relational database management systems out there that you might have heard of like: Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL. But in this course, we'll be using Microsoft SQL Server and learn to write a specific style of SQL called Transact-SQL or T-SQL for short. There are some syntactical differences among the different versions of SQL, so once you've mastered one version, you could probably look at code from another one and understand what's going on, but the skills you learn in this course won't be 100% transferable to other applications. The major differences among the different RDBMS options has to do with feature stacks, under the hood performance tuning, support, and costs. The program I'll be using to run my code and interact with the databases in this course is called SQL Server Management Studio or SSMS. Before you can start writing any code, you'll need to make sure that you have the latest version of SQL Server downloaded and started on your computer. And Microsoft has all that you'll need to do that right on their website. You can go here to download SQL Server. The developer version is free and will do just fine for your first steps into SQL coding. And you just need to install it using the default settings provided. Then you can go here for instructions on how to start the SQL Server Configuration Manager and the SQL Server instance that you've downloaded on your machine. The program I'll be using to run my code and interact with the databases is called SQL Server Management Studio or SSMS, which you can also download for free here. Once you have all that ready, you'll be good to go.

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