[Instructor] Before we get into working with SQL Server, it's probably a good idea to talk about what SQL Server actually is. SQL Server 2017 is a Relational Database Management System or RDBMS. It uses a database engine to handle all of the tasks associated with storing and retrieving data from a database, creating new databases and their components such as tables, and acts as a gatekeeper through the management of users and their access permissions. Because of its nature as a server, it's typically always running on a computer that it's installed on, ready to respond to incoming requests, to perform the required tasks, and then serve the information back out to the user that requested it.
In most production environments, SQL Server would be installed on a dedicated machine and users would log in remotely from their own computers to access the databases that they wanted to use. However, SQL Server can also be installed on a local computer. This approach simplifies the connections and is the method that we're going to be using in this course. A SQL Server installation is called an instance and a single instance can hold many individual databases under its umbrella. You might have one database to track your product offerings and a separate database to contain employee records all on the same instance.
Multiple instances of SQL Server can be installed on a single computer which helps administrators control access and manage resources. To keep the entire system running smoothly, there will typically be at least one user called the system administrator that oversees the configuration and management of the server itself. They'll configure and maintain its hardware and manage the user accounts that are allowed access into the system. Then each individual database will have one or more database administrators that are in charge of creating and maintaining tables and populating them with data, performing backups and establishing user permissions within the database itself.
For instance, a database user might only need to read records from a specific table and should be blocked from viewing information stored in other tables. In this course, we'll look at some of the many tasks that system administrators and database administrators will be responsible for performing. At the heart of SQL Server is, as its name would apply, something called SQL. SQL stands for Structure Query Language. It's the standardized way that database administrators interact with most database systems on the market today. The specific implementation of SQL that Microsoft SQL Server uses or the dialect if you prefer is called Transact-SQL, Transact-SQL or simply T-SQL depending on who you talk to.
With the T-SQL language, you'll be able to query the database for information, filter and sort records, and combine tables together in order to retrieve exactly the information that you need in the order and format that is required for any situation. Most system and database administrators will issue commands using Transact-SQL scripts and we'll look at the syntax of those commands later in the course. Microsoft also provides a graphical user interface called Management Studio. It's a separate add on program that isn't required, but we'll install this to help get us used to the server's operation and ease us into writing our own T-SQL commands in a more beginner-friendly environment.
SQL Server 2017 is an exciting release with lots of new features including the ability to install on Linux computers as well as Windows PCs. Regardless of your platform, the underlying server software is the same and the same T-SQL commands will apply. However, the graphical user interface to the server isn't yet available on Linux so for this course, we're going to focus on the Windows PC edition. While it's possible to connect to SQL Server instances on Linux from a Management Studio session on a Windows PC, connecting to remote SQL Server instances is a bit beyond the scope of this introductory course.
With that said though, if running SQL Server on Linux sounds like your cup of tea, then you'll want to keep your eye out for additional courses that focus exclusively on working with SQL Server on Linux in the near future. Now that we know what it's used for and some of the components to the system, it's time to see how we can leverage the capabilities of SQL Server on our own.
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