Beginning T-SQL with Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 and 2008

Chapter 1. Introducing T-SQL and Data Management Systems

This first chapter introduces you to some of the fundamentals of the design and architecture of relational databases and presents a brief description of SQL as a language. If you are new to SQL and database technologies, this chapter will provide a foundation to help ensure the rest of the book is as useful as possible. If you are already comfortable with the concepts of relational databases and Microsoft's implementation, you might want to skip ahead to Chapter 2, "SQL Server Fundamentals," or Chapter 3, "SQL Server Tools." Both of these chapters introduce the features and tools in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 and discuss how they are used to write T-SQL.

T-SQL Language

I have mentioned to my colleagues and anyone else who might have been listening that one day I was going to write a version of Parker Brother's Trivial Pursuit entitled "Trivial Pursuit: Geek Edition." This section gives you some background on the T-SQL language and provides the information you need to get the orange history wedge on the topic of "Database History" in Trivial Pursuit: Geek Edition.

T-SQL is Microsoft's implementation of a standard established by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) for the Structured Query Language (SQL). SQL was first developed by researchers at IBM. They called their first pre-release version of SQL "SEQUEL," which is a pseudo-acronym for Structured English QUEry Language. The first release version was renamed to SQL, ...