New Book Introduction To SQL Server

By: K. Brian Kelley | Comments (3) | Related: More > Professional Development Books

Problem

You have end users or developers who have little to no experience with SQL Server. You're looking for a resource to recommend to them to help them get started, but Books Online is too much, and what you have on your bookshelf is overwhelming for them, too.

Solution

Look no further, because that is the purpose behind the aptly titled book, Introduction to SQL Server.

Introduction to SQL Server starts out with the terminology DBAs and database developers familiar with SQL Server know, but those who are new to the product do not. It then moves in how to connect, how to build an ODBC connection, and how to test such a connection. This is often the first place a new user encounters an issue and this book ensures that something SQL Server professionals take for granted is explained in understandable terms for someone learning to connect to SQL Server for the first time.

From there the book launches into a break overview of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). More and more business users are using this product nowadays as it gives them options not available in Microsoft Access and Excel. A lot of developers prefer SSMS over Visual Studio for coding T-SQL. Therefore, we take a quick dive into the tool - enough to get their feet wet, but not so much as to overwhelm them.

Next the book heads into SQL syntax. While quite a few folks will likely stick to the GUI tools (and the SSMS chapter shows them how to do just that), for those who want to build more powerful queries, or to understand how to locate and put together the data they are trying to retrieve, these next chapters provide the meat on doing just that. The concept of tables is discussed as well as how to use SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE to retrieve and manipulate the data.

Finally, Introduction to SQL Server heads into more tools. Up first is coverage of how to build a simple SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report using BIDS and the report wizard. As end users become more savvy and as database professionals take on more work, the business of report writing will fall more and more to end users. This chapter gets them started.

After the walkthrough on building an SSRS report, Quest's Toad and the Microsoft Office suite are looked at. The Toad tool is covered to provide users an understanding of something other than the standard tools provided by Microsoft. Toad has been around for a while, is available in a free version, and makes some things easier than they are in either SSMS or Visual Studio. The Microsoft Office chapter looks at accessing SQL Server using Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel. As we move more and more to pulling data into these products and manipulating them on the "desktop," the more end users need to be familiar with how to get started working with the data in the Microsoft Office suite of products.

Finally, the last chapter covers how to obtain and install SQL Server Express, in order that an end user or database developer may have a local sandbox with which to get more familiar with SQL Server. SQL Server Express is an ideal tool because by default it is not accessible from the network and it tries to run in the smallest footprint possible.

Next Steps

Obtain a copy of Introduction to SQL Server for everyone you think might benefit from it.
Read the reviews on it.

About the author

K. Brian Kelley is a SQL Server author and columnist focusing primarily on SQL Server security.

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Comments For This Article

Monday, March 14, 2011 - 11:47:11 AM - S.MACLAREN

I will do Brian. I don't think they are show stoppers, but might be a good idea to sort out, as it make it a bit odd to read!

Oops - I seem to have made one or two errors in my mail too

Cheers

Seumas :)

Monday, March 14, 2011 - 10:26:09 AM - K. Brian Kelley

If you could send me an email at kbriankelley {at} acm {dot} org with some examples that you have found, that would be great. We self-published (and self-edited) the book and the areas where we saw issue depend on which manual of style you use, but then we're the ones looking at the lines we've written.There's always that case that our minds are telling us something is correct when someone reading it fresh spots the error.

Monday, March 14, 2011 - 9:16:21 AM - S.MACLAREN

Hi, I am not exactly a total beginner, but would strongly benefit from this book, as I am pretty certain as it would help me revise things I know and correct some misunderstandings.

A 5 minute look at Amazon's sale site for the book revealed that the book (as previewed there) has a quite a number of punctuation / spelling type problems.

Although being picky is not my thing, when a book in in print and technical information is required to be crystal clear, these errors won't help and won't help sell what is probably a good book. it really should have had a proper publisher's review of that aspect!

Perhaps someone could alert the publisher and get it done.