November 2008
Beginner
696 pages
17h 43m
English
Content preview from Learning C# 3.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Relational Databases and SQL
Although one can certainly write an entire book on relational databases, and another on SQL, the essentials of these technologies aren’t hard to understand, and you’ll understand the chapter better if we spend a little time on the basics. A database is a repository of data. A relational database organizes your data into tables. In this chapter, we’ll use the Northwind database, which is available as a free download from Microsoft. It was originally intended for a much older version of SQL Server, but it works well for our examples in this chapter without requiring too much installation work on your part.
Installing the Northwind Database
The Northwind database is a database file that’s intended for testing and practice purposes. To use the database, you’ll need to make sure that you have SQL Server Express edition. If you’re using Visual Studio, it was installed by default. If you’re using C# Express, installing SQL Server was optional, and if you followed the instructions in Chapter 1, you already have it installed. If not, head back to Chapter 1 and check out the installation instructions there.
If you’re using Windows Vista, you’re going to need to do a bit of extra work (if not, you can skip the next few paragraphs). Vista requires that only an administrator can install and access databases, but your default user isn’t automatically added to the SQL Server Administrators group. Fortunately, there’s an easy fix for this problem:
Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.