What is Microsoft SQL Server?

 

SQL Server Express is free database software that works great with any web application framework such as PHP, and your favorite applications such as Word press, and Drupal. Free SQL server comes with reporting options and other expansions you’re simply not going to find anywhere else. It’s everything you’re looking for in a database. SQL is an ANSI (American National Standard institute) Standard.

The SQL Server solution for single user applications is the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE), a version of the full SQL Server engine that requires 50 megabytes of disk space, the same installer as SQL Server, and requires that the SQL Server client be installed. Since MSDE is SQL Server, with a governor to limit the number of users, it suffers from the same disadvantages as the full product. The licensing for MSDE is complex’s to deploy MSDE, purchase of a Microsoft product that includes a MSDE deployment license is required. If the deployment license is acquired by purchasing a Microsoft Visual Studio or Visual FoxPro product you can only deploy MSDE with applications developed with that product. The Advantage Local Server does not have these deployment restrictions. Just download it and deploy your application – all at no cost. The main benefits of SQL Server over Access are improved reliability, better performance, reduced network traffic and increased scalability. Drawbacks are an increased deployment cost and a more complex support environment. For small workgroups of up to a dozen users on a Local Area Network with modest data requirements (no more than 50,000 records) and without ultra-high reliability requirements then Access is probably your best bet. Outside of these parameters you should probably look to a client/server solution such as SQL Server.

SQL Server is offered in several editions with different feature set and pricing options to meet a variety of user needs, including the following:

• Enterprise: Designed for large enterprises with complex data requirements, data warehousing and Web-enabled databases. Has all the features of SQL Server, and its license pricing is the most expensive.
• Standard: Targeted toward small and medium organizations. Also supports e-commerce and data warehousing.
• Workgroup: For small organizations. No size or user limits and may be used as the backend database for small Web servers or branch offices.

• Express: Free for distribution. Has the fewest number of features and limits database size and users. May be used as a replacement for an Access database

What Can SQL do?

• SQL can execute queries against a database
• SQL can retrieve data from a database
• SQL can insert records in a database
• SQL can update records in a database
• SQL can delete records from a database
• SQL can create new databases
• SQL can create new tables in a database
• SQL can create stored procedures in a database
• SQL can create views in a database
• SQL can set permissions on tables, procedures, and views

Using SQL in Your Web Site

To build a web site that shows data from a database, you will need:

• An RDBMS database program (i.e. MS Access, SQL Server, MySQL)
• To use a server-side scripting language, like PHP or ASP
• To use SQL to get the data you want
• To use HTML / CSS

SQL Command

The SQL commands to interact with relational databases are CREATE, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and DROP. These commands can be classified into groups based on their nature.

Advantages of SQL Server

SQL Server offers many advantages over other types of databases. Some of those advantages include the following:

• Security: SQL Server provides two security models including integration with Windows Authentication to provide robust security platform for managing your organizations information. Security can be managed across all database objects including tables, views, and stored procedures and at a very granular level, to provide complete information security. Database encryption is now available as well to secure SQL Server database at rest.
• Scalability: SQL Server is a highly scalable enterprise database platform capable of managing petabytes of data while delivery high performance. This allows organizations to deploy SQL Server databases with the confidence that SQL Server can continue to deliver superior performance even as their needs and businesses grow.
• High Availability/Failover: SQL Server provides a variety of high availability features including fail over clustering available on the Standard and Enterprise editions, database mirroring, log shipping, and database snapshots to meet your organizations’ needs.
• Business Intelligence: SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions come with extensive business intelligence capabilities through SQL Server Analysis Services. Analytical models can be developed to breakdown business information to provide business insights for managing and forecasting business needs. SQL Server also comes with integrated reporting capabilities from SQL Server Reporting Services which allows organizations to access business critical information across the organization. In more recent versions of SQL Server, Power Pivot for Microsoft Excel has been added to allow users another familiar tool for analyzing business data.
• Integration: SQL Server provides a robust set of integration tools call SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) which can be used candidate data from multiple heterogeneous data sources for holistic data view and comprehensive data analysis. SSIS can also be used to migrate data from other database formats (Oracle, DBase, Paradox, legacy formats, Microsoft Access) to SQL Server.