Wikipedia says: “Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which may run either on the same computer or on another computer across a network (including the Internet).”
There are a lot of posts at this site regarding SQL Server. To see a list of links to these posts, go to the home page of BeginCodingNow.com and click the Categories link and scroll down to the section on SQL Server.
There are a number of single posts on SQL Server at this site, but there are also a number of groups of posts that deal with a single topic that have been organized into a series of posts. Here is a list of those series.
- Logical Query
- Summarizing Data
- Left Joins
- Duplicates
- Subqueries
- Check Constraints
- Data Validation
- Window Functions
- Sequential Numbers
- Exception Handling
- SQL Server Import
- Bulk Insert
- XQuery
- XML Shredding
- CSV In XML Out Project
- Internal Data Structures
Sources of Information
There are a lot of sources of information on T-SQL. There is a “cheat-sheet” on T-SQL at the website of Brian Vander Plaats. A site I like is SQL Server Central. They have “stairways” which are turtorials. Microsoft’s site on SQL Server 2017 is good. Another good site is Microsoft’s SQL Sever Developer Centre. Sites Bay has a tutorial on the SQL Language here.
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
Installing SQL Server on your computer involves two installations: SQL Server itself and SSMS. As of the autumn of 2018, SSMS is at version 17.9. Note that SSMS runs on Windows only. If you want a tool that runs on platforms other than Windows, have a look at Azure Data Studio. It is a cross-platform tools that runs on macOS, Linux as well as Windows.