Chapter 3. Databases and Database Files

Kalen Delaney

Simply put, a Microsoft SQL Server database is a collection of objects that hold and manipulate data. A typical SQL Server instance has only a handful of databases, but it’s not unusual for a single instance to contain several dozen databases. The technical limit for one SQL Server instance is 32,767 databases. But practically speaking, this limit would never be reached.

To elaborate a bit, you can think of a SQL Server database as having the following properties and features:

  • It is a collection of many objects, such as tables, views, stored procedures, and constraints. The technical limit is 231–1 (more than 2 billion) objects. The number of objects typically ranges from hundreds to tens of thousands. ...

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