SQL Server from Zero to Production

Description

Most people learn SQL by copying a SELECT statement, getting an answer, and moving on. That works until a report that took two seconds starts taking two minutes, a deployment causes deadlocks under real load, or you’re asked to design a schema that still makes sense three years from now.

This book is written to prepare you for those moments. Written by a Lead Software Engineer with eight years of full-stack .NET and SQL Server experience in enterprise, reporting and healthcare systems, it treats SQL Server as a real system with real internals. It doesn’t just teach you to store and fetch rows.

It takes you from your very first table to running a production database, across 15 parts and 113 chapters:

• Foundations and T-SQL: databases, data types, keys, constraints, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, NULL logic, CASE and built-in functions
• Querying real data: JOINs, aggregation, subqueries, EXISTS, CTEs, recursive CTEs and window functions
• Database design: normalization, denormalization, relationships and designing for real applications
• Programming: views, stored procedures, functions, temp tables, cursors and dynamic SQL
• Transactions and concurrency: ACID, isolation levels, locking, blocking and deadlocks
• Indexing and performance: clustered and nonclustered indexes, statistics, execution plans, parameter sniffing, Query Store and troubleshooting
• Advanced SQL Server: JSON, XML, MERGE, PIVOT, temporal tables, partitioning, columnstore, In-Memory OLTP and full-text search
• Security: logins, roles, permissions, SQL injection, encryption, row-level security and auditing
• Backup, restore and high availability: recovery models, point-in-time recovery and disaster recovery
• Production engineering: monitoring, DMVs, wait statistics, capacity planning, maintenance and a troubleshooting playbook
• SQL Server with .NET: ADO.NET, Entity Framework Core, connection pooling and API design

Every concept follows the same proven pattern: what it is, why it exists, a basic example, a real-world example, how the production version differs, performance notes, common mistakes, when not to use it, and a key takeaway. One sample database, CompanyDB, grows with you from beginner tables to a production-grade schema.

You’ll put it all together in four hands-on projects: an employee management system, an e-commerce database, a healthcare-style reporting database (using fictional data), and a production reporting system. Then you’ll get ready for your next role with seven chapters of SQL Server interview questions and a career path section for developers, database engineers, performance specialists and architects.

The back matter includes SQL Server anti-patterns, a glossary and a quick-reference cheat sheet.

Who it’s for: complete beginners, developers moving to intermediate SQL, senior engineers tackling performance and concurrency, and database engineers responsible for production systems. You don’t need any prior database experience, and all examples use SQL Server 2022 Developer Edition, which is free.

Format: PDF, 398 pages.

This is an independent guide and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft.