SQL Server Fundamentals

Introduction to SQL Server
Hello I'm Dan Sullivan from Pluralsight and I'll be presenting this introduction to SQL Server. In this module we'll be looking at SQL Server from the point of view of a developer who uses SQL Server in their applications. We'll be looking at the services SQL Server provides, probably the principle one of these is the database engine service which implements a relational database and uses a dialect of SQL called Transact-SQL to implement applications in it. We'll be looking at the various applications that developers use when developing applications for SQL Server, probably the principal one of these is SQL Server Management Studio. And we'll be looking at some of the libraries that applications use when they want to and connect to SQL Server and do things with it so let's get started.

CTE's and Ranking
Hello. I'm Dan Sullivan from Pluralsight. And I'm presenting this module on Common Table Expressions and Ranking Functions. In this module, we are going to be looking at a number of features which, though, part of the SQL ANSI standard are relatively recent editions to SQL Server. Common Table Expressions or CTEs are an extension to the syntax of select, insert, update, and delete statements. CTEs precede the definition of the operation the statement performs. They define named result sets, that is sets of rows produced by a query that can be referred to subsequently in the expression. You can think of each named result set as a temporary view. The TOP clause can be used in a SELECT statement to prune down the size of the result set to the first N rows in the sequence specified by an ORDER BY clause. It can also be used in an insert, update, or delete statement to limit the number of rows that it processes. Ranking assigns a row number to a row according to the order in which it would be sorted by a sort criterion you specify, but the rows are not actually sorted. Multiple rankings of a row, each with a different criterion are allowed. Some rankings are unique, that is each row is assigned a different number, some rankings are shared and may produce multiple rows with the same ranking. Partitioning conceptually breaks the result set into multiple windows or sets of rows according to a selection criterion you specify. Each window is processed as though it were a separate table with respect to ranking and aggregate functions. Ranking and partitioning is somewhat like using a GROUP BY clause in a query. But multiple different rankings and partitioning can be specified in a query and there are no restrictions on what columns can be output by the query.

Hierarchies
Hello. I'm Dan Sullivan and I'm presenting this module On Managing Hierarchies or Trees in SQL Server.

Managing Query Plans
Hello. I'm Dan Sullivan and I'll be presenting this module on Managing Query Plans. In this module, we'll be looking at how SQL Server optimizes the execution of SQL queries by using Query Plans. We'll see how query plans can be parameterize to further optimize how they're used, how SQL Server selects plans, and how we can control how SQL Server builds plans by using plan guides.

Security I
Hello! I'm Dan Sullivan from Pluralsight and I'll be presenting this module on Security in SQL Server. An enterprise typically has a large amount of data to manage. Some or all of that is typically stored in a database. That data must be protected. One way to protect the data is to have very limited access to it. However, most of the data in some form or other must be made available to just about all members of an enterprise. SQL Server provides fine-grained security on the data it stores with the framework of permissions that can be scaled over a large number of users. In SQL Server, our principal access is data. SQL Server must authenticate a principal first. That is make sure the principal is who it claims to be. It must then find permissions associated with that principal to determine what that principal is authorized to do. In this module, we'll be looking at how principals, which you can think of as being users of the database, are managed and how they are associated with the various things they are authorized to do.