About this course

If you are in UfB, welcome.

If you are not, don't buy this course. Instead, please look at my 70-461 Session 1-7: Querying Microsoft SQL Server (SQL code) course instead, which includes this course and 6 other courses.

This course is the foundation for the Microsoft Certificate 70-461: "Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012".

In Sessions 1 and 2, we learned all about dates, strings and number data types and DML statements. In sessions 3 and 4, we created views, procedures, triggers, constraints and combining datasets, and in session 5 and 6 we learned about ranking and aggregate functions, sub-questions, functions and dynamic SQL.

In this session we'll be looking at transactions, seeing how to explicitly start and end them, and finding out how they can block other users in the database. Then we'll see about how to indexes and their role in optimising queries. 

We'll also see how we can use Dynamic Management Views to see how we can improve our use of indexes. We'll then look at how to write a cursor, and when to use this row-based operation, and the impact of using scalar UDFs.

No prior knowledge other than what we covered in Sessions 1 to 6 is required. This course builds on the knowledge previously gained in those previous sessions.

There are regular quizzes to help you remember the information.

Once finished, you will know what how to create transactions, indexes, cursors, XML data and more, and we'll have expanded on our current knowledge of T-SQL.