SQL Server is a relational database management system, or RDBMS, developed and marketed by Microsoft. Similar to other RDBMS software, SQL Server is built on top of SQL, a standard programming language for interacting with the relational databases. SQL server is tied to Transact-SQL, or T-SQL, the Microsoft’s implementation of SQL that adds a set of proprietary programming construct.

The core component of the SQL Server is the Database Engine. The Database Engine consists of a relational engine that processes queries and a storage engine that manages database files, pages, pages, index, etc. The database objects such as stored procedures, views, and triggers are also created and executed by the Database Engine.

A database in SQL Server is made up of a collection of tables that stores a specific set of structured data. A table contains a collection of rows, also referred to as records or tuples, and columns, also referred to as attributes. Each column in the table is designed to store a certain type of information, for example, dates, names, dollar amounts, and numbers.

Tables are used to store data in the database. Tables are uniquely named within a database and schema. Each table contains one or more columns. And each column has an associated data type that defines the kind of data it can store e.g., numbers, strings, or temporal data.