Learning Resources

Lesson 1:  What is a database?

This introduction covers the questions and terminology SQL Server beginners need to create and manage databases, such as: What is a SQL Server database? How is a SQL Server database different from an Excel spreadsheet? What do SQL Server databases do in my Web site or software applications? What's SQL Server Express' relation to Visual Studio Express? What do terms like "ADO.NET" mean?

Duration: 28 minutes 15 seconds

Lesson 2:  Understanding Database Tables and Records

SQL Server beginners will learn about tables and definitions of data types, properties, keys, etc. in this second video. Find out how table rows, columns, and fields interrelate and whether columns can be empty.

Duration: 24 minutes 56 seconds

Lesson 3:  More about Column Data Types and Other Properties

SQL Server beginners will explore data integrity, learn which data types to use for what, and avoid common data type pitfalls.

Duration: 21 minutes 37 seconds

Lesson 4:  Designing Relational Database Tables

Why are relational databases the most popular? SQL Server beginners will learn to differentiate between primary and foreign keys, design relational database tables, and learn about normalization rules and de-normalization.

Duration: 34 minutes 10 seconds

Lesson 5:  Manipulating Database Data

SQL Server beginners will learn about ADO.NET objects and execution of SQL statement from ADO.NET. Explore SQL and learn about insert, update, and delete statements.

Duration: 40 minutes 20 seconds

Note: This lesson requires Management Studio Express and MSXML

Lesson 6:  More Structured Query Language

SQL Server beginners will discover more SQL statements like sub-select and learn stored procedures and their counterparts in C# and VB methods.

Duration: 23 minutes 13 seconds

Lesson 7:  Understanding Security and Network Connectivity

SQL Server beginners will learn to differentiate between SQL Server database files and SQL Server processes. Explore scenarios for connecting to SQL Server Express databases, enabling and disabling user instances, login permissions, and other security precautions.

Duration: 40 minutes 59 seconds

Lesson 8:  Connecting your Web Application to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

SQL Server beginners will walkthrough the entire workflow of creating a database driven Web application and use visual tools to quickly create an administration application.

Duration: 65 minutes 58 seconds

Lesson 9:  Using SQL Server Management Studio

SQL Server Management Studio Express will typically be your main interface into SQL Server Express. This lesson demonstrates the essential techniques and skills you’ll need to successfully connect to database instances, navigate the query window and scripting database objects, attaching, detaching and backing up databases, and much more.

Duration: 40 minutes 26 seconds

Lesson 10:  Getting Started with Reporting Services

SQL Server Reporting Services allows you to design and deploy nicely formatted and interactive reports representative of your data. Suitable for print or online distribution, these reports … and it allows you to get professional results very quickly. This video demonstrates how to set up Reporting Services and the Business Intelligence Development Studio to build reports using the wizards and designers, and deploy them to your Report Server.

Duration: 32 minutes 51 seconds

Lesson 11:  Building and Customizing Reports in Business Intelligence Development Studio

Building on the previous lesson, we dive into building reports from scratch and modifying the reports that were created using the wizards and designers. We also demonstrate how to embed your reports into your ASP.NET Web Form applications.

Duration: 44 minutes 50 seconds

Lesson 12:  Creating and Using Stored Procedures

This video expands on the topic of Stored Procedures which was introduced several lessons ago. In this video we explain the basic syntax to create and update stored procedures, using input and output parameters, return values, declaring variables and adding other T-SQL programming elements into you stored procedures, how to execute your stored procedures from the query window, and finally the Visual Basic and C# syntax required to utilize stored procedures in your own applications.

Duration: 42 minutes 34 seconds

Lesson 13:  Enabling Full-Text Search in your Text Data

Full-Text search allows you to save large portions of texteven Microsoft Word documents, or other file formatsinto your database and perform complex queries based on this textual data while expecting great performance. This lesson demonstrates how to set up Full-Text search paying particular attention to the nuances of setting it up within SQL Server Express. Then we move to creating full-text indexes, configuring the index population settings, and performing queries that demonstrate the power of the CONTAINS predicate and its many, many variations.

Duration: 38 minutes 25 seconds