Understanding core concepts of SQL Server 2016

- [Narrator] In this section we're going to talk about some core concepts of Microsoft SQL Server 2016. What exactly is Microsoft SQL Server? Many people say it's a database and that's partially correct however it would be more correct to say it is a relational database management system, sometimes abbreviated RDBMS. So let's talk about each one of these words, relational database management system. When we say relational we mean that SQL Server has the ability to create connections between pieces of data.

These connections are called keys. We use the concept of a primary key and and a foreign key to make connections between different tables in the database and these connections can be very powerful. The next word, database, is certainly what most people think of with SQL Server. And by database we mean SQL Server has the ability to store data, retrieve data, and manipulate data. And these are the core functions, the most common functions, of what we expect from a relational database management system. The next word management means SQL Server provides tools to secure, monitor, and automate some administrative task.

So going beyond a database that would just store data SQL Server also provides tools to work with that database, to secure it, monitor it, automate it. And the last word, system. And system roughly means a complete solution. SO SQL Server provides a wide variety of tools, almost all of the tools you could ever need to work with a database. There are some third party solutions that do exist but many of those are for very specialized functions that most people won't get into. So the SQL Server product really provides everything we need to manage a database.

SQL Server includes a number of different components. In this course we'll be focused on the database engine which is the primary way to store and retrieve data, and we'll also spend some time on the different tools that come with SQL Server.