Introduction to SQL Server 2017

- [Instructor] SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database are both mature database products that can support a wide variety of data persistence needs for your application. SQL Server is a mature and robust platform that has been around for over 25 years now. It supports a wide variety of applications throughout the world, whether it be ERP systems, gambling sites, nonprofits, all sorts of systems that have wide varieties of workload and needs. Some of these systems may run into millions of transactions per second, where other systems may have merely thousands of transactions per day.

SQL Server includes many tools, including Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Machine Learning Services, and a number of other components. We're not going to focus on those in this training class. We're going to focus strictly on the database engine and how you can better build applications to scale across large workloads. SQL Server includes a number of features that will help your application scale to meet the needs of your customer base. Depending on the nature of your application, you will use a different set of tools. So it's very important to understand the nature of your application and what that workloads looks like.

Not all features are good for all workloads, and that's really key to understanding how things scale. For example, columnstore indexes, which is a feature that greatly helps data warehouse and analytical workloads perform extremely fast, would absolutely cripple an online transaction processing type of application, where you're doing heavy insert and update workload. So different applications are going to have different needs, and you'll learn more about that in subsequent videos.