Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

1.2. An Overview of Database Objects

An RDBMS such as SQL Server contains many objects. Object purists out there may quibble with whether Microsoft's choice of what to call an object (and what not to) actually meets the normal definition of an object, but, for SQL Server's purposes, the list of some of the more important database objects can be said to contain such things as:

The database itself	Indexes
The transaction log	CLR assemblies
Tables	Reports
Filegroups	Full-text catalogs
Diagrams	User-defined data types
Views	Roles
Stored procedures	Users
User-defined functions

1.2.1. The Database Object

The database is effectively the highest-level object that you can refer to within a given SQL Server. (Technically speaking, the server itself can be considered to be an object, but not from any real "programming" perspective, so we're not going there.) Most, but not all, other objects in a SQL Server are children of the database object.

If you are familiar with old versions of SQL Server you may now be saying, "What? What happened to logins? What happened to Remote Servers and SQL Agent tasks?" SQL Server has several other objects (as listed previously) that exist in support of the database. With the exception of linked servers, and perhaps Integration Services packages, these are primarily the domain of the database administrator and as such, you generally don't give them significant thought during the design and programming processes. (They are programmable via something calledthe SQL Management ...