10 SQL Terms You Should Know

Some of you might just be starting out as a database administrator and need to know what a basic Transact-SQL query is for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, others might already be creating database objects. Either way, we put together a list of a few terms regarding Microsoft SQL Server that any database administrator should know.

1. Transact-SQL (T-SQL): Central to SQL Server, T-SQL is a set of programming extensions from Sybase and Microsoft allowing all applications to communicate with SQL Server (regardless of the user interface of the application) by sending T-SQL statements to the server.
2. Query: SQL code is written as a query statement and then performed against a database. All SQL queries perform data operations, including selecting, inserting/updating, or creating data objects. Clauses begin each query statement, such as SELECT, UPDATE, CREATE, or DELETE.
3. SQL Azure: Service of Microsoft extending SQL server capabilities to the cloud allowing users to make relational queries against stored data.
4. Relational Database: A collection of two-dimensional tables storing certain types of data that is organized to minimize duplication and data anomalies. The stored data is altered using the programming language SQL.
5. High Availability (HA): Masking the effects of a hardware or software failure, downtime for users is minimized by allowing continued access to applications.
6. Aggregate Functions:: Determines various statistics on sets of values by calculating a set of values and returning a single value.
7. Recovery Model: Database property that defines the level of data recovery needed, including whether the transaction log requires backing up and what kinds of restore operations are available.
8. Dynamic Management Views (DMVs): Look into the SQL Server and monitor its health and performance of the server, diagnose any problems, and adjust performance as needed.
9. Extensible Markup Language (XML): Markup language that sets rules for encoding documents so that they can be read by both human and machine.
10. Common Language Runtime (CLR): Provides an execution environment for .NET framework code, runs the code, and allows the programming languages to use the same representation.

Visit the SQL library at Microsoft for a complete list of SQL terminology.

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