Welcome to the first video in this course introduction to SQL Server 2017. And today we'll be looking at downloading and installing this bit of software. Now, a database is pretty much a logical collection of related data. And that's it in a nutshell, if you have prior experience with databases, it probably came with Microsoft Access, or my SQL. And you just want to extend your knowledge beyond that. And even if you have no prior knowledge of databases, this is an excellent course to get you up to speed with what databases are capable of what preparation needs to go in place, and how you can go about starting your journey towards becoming a database administrator or just manipulating data in databases all together.

As I said before, we'll be exploring all of these concepts using Microsoft SQL Server 2017. And I already have it up on my screen the page for download, so I'm have included the URL, as outlined here in the class notes. And this would get you to downloading the Microsoft SQL Server 2017 experts database engine. And the short description is that it's a powerful and reliable database management system that allows you to build lightweight websites and desktop applications. So this is pretty good, pretty decent. It's a decent starting place.

If you don't have that high spec high end machine, you just have a regular machine, you just want to get started, this is an excellent option. There are other additions that you would probably see in your research, but if you follow this link, it will cut through all of that noise and all the other editions and we can get started with Express. So you can go ahead and click that download and initially initiate that download procedure. And then another bit of software that we're interested in is the SQL Server Management Studio. Now the Management Studio will be your gateway into actually interacting with the database interrogating the data, and writing what we call queries in a language called SQL. We'll get into all of those things in due time.

But for now, you can follow this URL. Once again, it's in the class notes. And we can just click this download button to initialize this download, which may take a while it's a pretty big file. So as soon as that download is done, we'll reconvene and then we'll walk through that installation process. Hey guys, welcome back. Now that our downloads are finished, we'll start by installing our SQL Express engine.

So we just click on that installation file, click Run, and then we will be greeted with this installation screen. We can click basic custom would allow you to select certain features. At this stage. We don't need to be doing that we can just go with basic we can go ahead and agree to the terms and conditions You can read it through if you wish. If you have other ideas, then you may want to change this directory. Otherwise, you might as well use as a default.

And you can see here that I've six gigabytes, we only really need 300 megabytes. So I'm just going to go ahead and click Install. And this may take a while. So we will reconvene once this is finished. Okay, so at the end of that installation procedure, you'll see that you were, you know, successful in doing this installation, and then they give you some information, they give you a connection string. So if you wanted to develop an application on top of this database, then you would probably want to pay attention to this part.

Well, that's not really necessary right now and they just give you the paths for the log files and other essential bits of the application. Another essential part of this installation process, as mentioned before, is the install the SQL Management Server studio. Then this Express Edition installation, they will actually give you an option to say install ssms. And this will really just bring up your browser to navigate to, well, I figured this page so the link to this page is already included in the class notes and hear from here you can get a direct download to the Management Studio. So if you didn't do it before, you may just follow this link and get that file. I already have it downloaded here, so I'll just initiate this installation.

All of this will launch the installer and they really just give you one button to click which is installed Of course you can change this location if you have other ideas for the path. Otherwise, you may leave it as the as the default and just click Install. So this may also take a while so we will reconvene at the end of this process. Okay, So our installation is finished and all we have to do is restarts to continue so we can just do that quickly. And we In the next video we'll start looking at how we start piecing everything together what a database is, and why learning this skill is so important. Stay tuned.