March 2008
Intermediate to advanced
766 pages
21h 15m
English
You can use many different kinds of databases in your ASP.NET projects, including Microsoft Access, SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL. However, the most commonly used database in ASP.NET 3.5 web sites is probably SQL Server from Microsoft. This book focuses on using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, as it comes for free with VWD and has a lot to offer out of the box. Also, since the database engine is identical to that of the commercial versions of SQL Server, it's easy to upgrade to those versions at a later stage in the development cycle. This upgrade path is described in more detail in Appendix B.
To work with the data in the database, SQL Server (and all other relational database systems) supports a query language called SQL.