Hey ALL;
I am enthusiastic to enter the world of Databases through SQL , but i don't know
if there's pre-requisits of any significance , i only know c# and java .
Besides what tools do i need? i have visual studio 2008 and sql server management studio
what else do i need? is it necessary to download a server OS?
Bare with me i'm just a beginner lol
Thanks all Natasha
You don't need a special server OS. SQL Server will run just fine on your development machine if you are just using it to learn. You'll want to make sure that SQL Server is installed in addition to Management Studio.
Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server Express are sufficient to learn the basics of a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS.) You can learn T-SQL (SQL Server's ANSI-SQL dialect,) schema design, Object-Relational Mapping, and more. SQL Express runs on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.
Oracle also provides an Express version, and there are other free options such as MySQL and SQLite.
SQL Server will run on your development system, and SQL Server Management Studio 2008 is a good tool to work with in SQL 2008.
If you want to connect through your network though, you'll need to configure the Network Area Surface to accept TCP Clients connections.
You might also want to try either MySQL and PostgreSQL. They're both free, much easier to install than SQL Server, and run on more platforms.
I recommend you to try SQL Server Express, it is the easiest server to work with if you are developing with C#. If you would like to learn SQL using Java almost any data base would be good.
A data base server it's a software like any other, you will have to communicate with it through your own program, making a connection, throwing SQL commands and interpreting its results. If you only wanted to learn SQL you also could install a client for the chosen data base server and learn through it, after that you could try to connect your program to this data base. In this case SQLite would work pretty good for you.
Definitely install one of the free databases (Oracle Express, SQL Server Express). I have used both of those. You might also want to check out this free tutorial. It will help you learn SQL syntax.