Many times, you wish you could have some more powerful tools 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 experiences 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 time and be able to query the state of the data from the past.

In this course, 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.

All these features mentioned are sometimes referred to 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 a purely logical model. For many years, we used to associate an 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”.

This is the first “beyond relational” course. SQL Server supports also data structures that are not pure tables in a classical relational way. Please see the “Beyond Classical RDBMS: Non-Tabular Data Structures” for this support.

Link to the agenda and sample videos from the course