CHAPTER 1
What Is SQL Server?
SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) developed by Microsoft. In order to find out exactly what that means, we need to ask three more questions:
- What is SQL?
- What is a server?
- What is an RDBMS?
To answer the first question, SQL is both a programming language and an acronym. It can be pronounced either “sequel” or literally with the letters SQL. It stands for Structured Query Language, and it is the language used to talk to databases. So from this, we can infer that SQL Server is actually a database server, which brings us to our second question: what exactly is a server?
A server is a computer ...
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