Business Rules Course Prerequisites

Server Cloud is the cloud version of Microsoft's SQL Server. It does require the following, however:

1. Experience using the Microsoft Windows 2008 Server network operating system
2. Familiarity with the definition, theory, and underlying function of relational databases
3. Completion of Introduction to SQL, Parts 1 and 2, or equivalent understanding of basic ANSI SQL statements
4. Completion of Creating a Database, the first course in this series, or equivalent understanding of relational concepts, basic Transact-SQL statements, and how to create databases and tables
5. Completion of Queries, Cursors, and Views, the second course in this series, or equivalent understanding of query statements, inner and outer joins, subqueries, views, and cursors

In the next lesson, the requirements for this course will be discussed.

An instance of an RDBMS such as SQL Server contains many objects. Object purists out there may quibble with whether Microsoft's choice of what to (and what not to) call an object actually meets the normal defi nition 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:

1. Database itself
2. The transaction log: Every SQL Server database has a transaction log that records all transactions and the database modifications made by each transaction. The transaction log is a critical component of the database. If there is a system failure, you will need that log to bring your database back to a consistent state.
3. Tables
4. Indexes: An index is an on-disk structure associated with a table or view that speeds retrieval of rows from the table or view. An index contains keys built from one or more columns in the table or view. These keys are stored in a structure (B-tree) that enables SQL Server to find the row or rows associated with the key values quickly and efficiently.
5. Filegroups: Filegroups are the physical files on your disc volumes that hold SQL Server's data and can be used for backup and administrative management purposes.
6. Diagrams
7. Views
8. Stored procedures
9. User-defined functions
10. Sequences
11. Users
12. Roles
13. Assemblies
14. Reports
15. Full-text catalogs:
16. User-defined data types: CREATE TYPE (Transact-SQL): Creates an alias data type or a user-defined type in the current database in SQL Server or Azure SQL Database. The implementation of an alias data type is based on a SQL Server native system type. A user-defined type is implemented through a class of an assembly in the Microsoft .NET Framework common language runtime (CLR). To bind a user-defined type to its implementation, the CLR assembly that contains the implementation of the type must first be registered in SQL Server by using CREATE ASSEMBLY.