You remember Steve, right? That’s Steve from Sales, the guy who absolutely needed access to an email that he deleted over a year ago. You probably clearly remember the hassles of having to first find and then restore his mailbox. Perhaps you even recall sifting through his messages, trying to find that single, solitary email, […]

So just how do you add a check constraint to a table or column? As with just about everything in SQL Server you can use SQL statements or Enterprise Manager to make the modifications. I’m going to show you how to add a constraint using Enterprise Manager, but feel free to look at the CREATE […]

To put it simply, a check constraint is a Boolean expression that evaluates to TRUE or FALSE (a note about NULL in a second). When a row is inserted or updated each check constraint is evaluated. If any of the check constraints evaluate FALSE the transaction is rolled back. If all of the check constraints […]

So all the tables have been added to the database, most if not all with logical relationships to one another EX: Each Order has many Order Detail, Each Salesperson has many Order, etc (if your not following I would suggest you stop here and read up on Logical Database Design)…what more do we need to […]

Back in More Database Creation Topics I gave an example of a transaction that moved money from one bank account to another. As the example illustrated, a transaction can prevent modification A from being made to the database unless modification B is also made. In other words, in a transaction, either all the modifications are […]

Once you have a logical design to work from, the process of creating your tables is quite simple. Start by opening Enterprise Manager, expand the server and database you would like to add a table too, then right click “Tables” and select “New Table…” from the menu.
The New Table window appears.
Each row represents an individual […]

Every column in your table must have a “data type,” which is simply a property that defines what type of data is stored in that column. In addition a data type will reject data that is not of the correct type (i.e. attempting to store a letter in a data type designed for numbers). SQL […]

Up to this point we have focused on the physical design of a database which includes things like files and filegroups. The physical design is focused on how data is stored and what is the most efficient way to access data. Now we are going to start to look at implementing the logical design of […]

Restoring a database from a file or tape backup is quite simple, but there are a few things you must think about when using the Full and Bulk_Logged recovery models. Note that we are not going to cover restoring a database that uses the simple recovery model. The first thing to understand is that restoring […]

Last week we decided on how often to backup our database, now we must decide where to backup our database. The first option available is to backup directly to tape from SQL Server. On the plus side a backup to tape allows for off-site storage of backups. On the down side tape backups are slow […]