Chapter 1. Starting Microsoft SQL Server

This chapter introduces SQL Server and SQL Server's Management Studio and its basic workings. You will learn how to create a database, view the objects and default tables in a database, use a query editor, activate the database in different ways, and create tables in the database using a load script. The load script is available at http://www.cs.uwf.edu/~sbagui. The load script will create the Student_course database for you. This database will be used throughout the rest of the book to learn SQL. At this point, you may want to copy the load script, SQLServer2005_load.sql, to your working directory on your computer, before you start working on the next section. Right-click on the script on the web site, select Save Target As, and save it to your working directory.

In this chapter, you will also learn how to view and modify table definitions; delete a table and a database; type, parse, execute and save a query; display the results in different forms; stop execution of a query; and print the query and results. The final section of this chapter discusses customizing SQL Server's settings.