Introduction to SQL Server

SQL Server Data Manipulation Language
Hello. My name is Dan Sullivan, and I'll be presenting this module on Manipulating Data with T-SQL. In this module we'll be looking at T-SQL or Transact-SQL, which is Microsoft's implementation of the SQL language. In this course we're going to use SQL Server Management Studio for examples. This tool is commonly used to write SQL queries for SQL Server. It's also a way you can interact with SQL Server to try things out. There are really two distinct languages in SQL. One is called the Data Manipulation Language or DML. That's what we'll be looking at in this module. DML gives you commands to select or if you wish get data. You add data with insert, change data with update, and remove data with delete. Sometimes DML is mistakenly referred to as data modification language meaning just insert, update, and delete. However, this is not the case. The Data Manipulation Language or DML includes select, insert, update, and delete and is the term that Dr. Codd used to describe these capabilities of a relational database.

Using Select
Hello. I'm Dan Sullivan from Pluralsight, and I'll be presenting this module on Using SELECT to ask questions about the data that's in your database. In this module we're going to look at using the select statement to get data out of a database by getting entities out of tables, and to do this we have a couple of sample tables in our sample database. One of them is called the People table, and it contains people's first name, last name, and their favorite color. And the other table is called the Car Stock table, and it's meant to contain cars that are in inventory at a dealership, that is the cars they have on their lot, and for each car we have things like the vehicle identification number, its color, its price, things like that. We're going to start off by looking at how you go in and inspect the database. Usually when you first start writing queries against the database you just want to get a feeling for what's in it, and we're going to look at a couple of ways to go and do that. Then we'll look at using queries to get entities out of a table and to select exactly which entities we want from that table and what attributes of those entities that we want. Sometimes you don't want to get all the entities or a group of entities out of a table. You want to find something out about all those entities, for example how many are there, and we're going to look at the count aggregate function as a way of doing that. And lastly we're going to look at one of the powerful features that's in a SQL language, and that's called join. Sometimes the questions you want to ask involve data that's in more than one table, and join is one way to answer those kind of questions. So, let's get started.

Using Insert, Update, and Delete
Hello. I'm Dan Sullivan from Pluralsight, and I'll be presenting this module on Using the Insert, Update, and Delete commands in SQL Server. This module will use examples to show how insert, update, and delete can be used to add and change the data in a table. Insert of course adds entities to a table, update changes the values of entities in a table, and by changing their value it means changing the value of one or more of their attributes, one or more of the values in the columns. And lastly, delete is used to remove entities from a table.

Data Definition Language
Hello. I'm Dan Sullivan from Pluralsight, and I'll be presenting this module on the SQL Data Definition Language. In previous modules we were looking at the data manipulation language or DML, the text-based language we use to work with the data in our database. In this module we will be looking at the data definition language or DDL, the text-based language we use to describe the data we want to store in our database and to manage our database. Dr. Codd said you must be able to do everything you need to do with a relational database using a text-based language, and DDL is the part of SQL you use to do things that don't involve working directly with the data. SQL Server looks at a database as a collection of objects. When you open a new query in SQL Server Management Studio and you see the dialog that asks you to log into SQL Server, what you are doing is accessing a login object that is in SQL Server. A table is another kind of object in the eyes of SQL Server. DDL uses create, alter, and drop commands to create objects like a table, then maybe change them, then when at some point they are no longer needed to throw them away. We are going to look at the DDL commands for tables. The DDL commands for other objects in the database are similar, though the details they manage might be quite different, so let's get started by looking at how to create a table.