Microsoft SQL Server 2019: A Beginner’s Guide, Seventh Edition

Microsoft SQL Server is a database system that comprises many components, including the Database Engine, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, SQL Server Graph Databases, SQL Server Machine Learning Services, and several other components. The following are a few of the reasons SQL Server is the best choice for a broad spectrum of end users and database programmers building business applications:

•   SQL Server is certainly the best system for Windows operating systems, because of its tight integration (and low pricing). Because the number of installed Windows systems is enormous and still increasing, SQL Server is a widely used database system.

•   As of SQL Server 2017, Microsoft supports other operating systems as well: several Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux, as well as macOS.

•   The Database Engine, as the relational database system component, is the easiest database system to use. In addition to the Database Engine’s well-known Windows-style user interface, Microsoft offers several different tools to help you create database objects, tune your database applications, and manage system administration tasks.

Generally, SQL Server isn’t only a relational database system. It is a platform that not only manages structured, semistructured, unstructured, and graph data but also offers comprehensive, integrated operational and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information.

Goals of the Book

Microsoft SQL Server 2019: A Beginner’s Guide follows six previous editions that covered SQL Server 7, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2012, and 2016. SQL Server has evolved significantly since I wrote the first edition over 20 years ago, but my overarching goal has remained the same: to provide a comprehensive introduction to SQL Server that is friendly to beginners.

Generally, all SQL Server users who want to get a good understanding of this database system and to work successfully with it will find this book very helpful. If you are a new SQL Server user but understand SQL, read the section “Differences Between SQL and Transact-SQL Syntax” later in this introduction.

This book addresses users of different components of SQL Server. For this reason, it is divided into several parts: The first three parts are most useful to users who want to learn more about Microsoft’s relational database component called the Database Engine. The fourth part of the book is dedicated to Business Intelligence (BI) users who use Analysis Services and/or Reporting Services. The fifth part of the book provides insight for users who want to learn about SQL Server features beyond those specific to relational data, such as integration of the JSON format with the relational engine, support for temporal and spatial data, and support for graph databases as an integral part of SQL Server. The last part of the book describes SQL Server Machine Learning Services, which provides the integration of the R system and the Python programming language with SQL Server