Inside Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005, Fourth Edition

Internal Storage

This section covers system catalogs and the internal data storage of tables. Although you can use SQL Server effectively without understanding the internals, understanding the details of how SQL Server stores data will help you develop efficient applications.

When you create a table, one or more rows are inserted into a number of system tables to manage that table. At a minimum, you can see metadata for your new table in the sys.tables, sys.indexes, and sys.columns catalog views. When you define the new table with one or more constraints, you’ll also be able to see information in the sys.check_constraints, sys.default_constraints, sys.key_constraints, or sys.foreign_keys views. For every table created, a single row that contains–among ...