Workshop description

Many times, you wish you could have some more powerful tool than the Transact-SQL (T-SQL) language for working with data. You might need to enable your users to use word search in your string columns or in Office documents to give them similar experience like they get when they search the web. You might need to implement constraints and do the data analysis with functions that are simply not implemented in T-SQL. Or you might need to maintain multiple versions of data over the time and be able to query the state of the data from the past.
All these features mentioned are sometimes referred as “beyond relational”. However, data type and language support in a specific database management product has nothing to do with the relational model, which is purely logical model. For many years, we used to associate a RDBMS with the SQL language and simple data types; but there are no limitations for both in the relational model. Therefore, I prefer to use the term “beyond classical RDBMS”.
In this seminar, you will learn how to manipulate the data stored in your SQL Server and Azure SQL Database with advanced T-SQL language elements and with other languages. You will learn about Full-Text Search (FTS), integrating CLR functions written in Visual C# or Visual Basic in your T-SQL code, and work with system-versioned tables within SQL Server.
Besides executing CLR code inside the Database Engine, SQL Server supports executing code in external engines with external languages. R, Python, and Java support are covered in the seminar as well.
Tabular structures are not always the best for storing some kinds of data. Maybe your data has a bit more dynamic structure than you can represent with tables, or has a very specific structure, like hierarchy. This seminar introduces how to deal with such data inside a SQL Server database.
You will learn how to store and retrieve semi-structured data in XML or JSON format. You can extend the collection of the data types supported by SQL Server with your own CLR data types, written in C# or VB. This infrastructure was used also by Microsoft through the for spatial data types. Hierarchical data, like XML and JSON, are just a special case of a general data structures called graphs. You will learn also how to use graphs in SQL Server.

Length of the workshop:

Half day (4 hours)

Key takeaways

The good and the bad about the “beyond relational” features.

Form of the workshop

Lecture (slides + demos)

What attendees need to prepare?

For testing all of the code, the attendees need SQL Server 2019 Developer Edition, with Full-Text Search and ML Services with all three languages (R, Python, Java) installed. In addition, they need either SQL Server management Studio or Azure Data Studio

Level

300