What is SQL Server?

- [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 SQL 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 and 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've 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. I do all of my development work on a Windows machine, but you can still run SQL Server on a Mac computer. Your installation and setup will just look a little different. You'll need to install a program called Docker, which you can download here. Obviously, you'll just select the appropriate download for Mac option for your machine. Then you can follow the instructions found in this blog post to set up and start SQL Server. You won't be able to run SSMS on a Mac either, but Azure Data Studio is another free tool that you can use for your SQL development. Download that program here. Your interface will look different than what I'm using in these videos, but you can still run all of the same queries in this tool, which will look something like this.