SQL Server - Summary

Congratulations for reaching the end of this SQL Server tutorial!

SQL Server is a powerful application, and this tutorial has provided an overview of the main concepts involved in administering SQL Server 2008 Express.

To recap briefly, we've:

• Created databases
• Created database tables
• Inserted data into those tables
• Used the SSMS to run a query
• Created a login account
• Looked at server roles
• Learned about database schemas
• Looked at linked servers
• and more

What Next?

There were a couple of areas we didn't touch on during this tutorial. This is mainly due to the fact that it is aimed at the free SQL Server Express version, which has its limitations.

All is not lost though. My SQL Server 2000 tutorial covers some of the areas that weren't included here. For example, you can learn about the SQL Server Agent for scheduling jobs to run automatically. You can also read about the SQL Profiler, which allows you to monitor events within your SQL Server.

The most logical next step from learning SQL Server is to learn SQL itself (if you haven't already done this that is). SQL stands for Structured Query Language and enables you to perform database related tasks programatically. Most of the tasks in this tutorial can be done programatically using SQL.

Probably the most common use for SQL is to work with the data in the database. For example, to insert data, select data, update data, or to delete data. Any database driven website will have many SQL statements doing this stuff.

To learn more about SQL, check out the SQL tutorial.

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