Database :

A database is similar to a data file in that it is a storage place for data. Like a data file, a database does not present information directly to a user; the user runs an application that accesses data from the database and presents it to the user in an understandable format.

RDBMS :

A relational database management system (RDBMS) is a program that lets you create, update, and administer a relational database. The leading RDBMS products are Oracle, IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL Server.

Normalization :

Well a relational database is basically composed of tables that contain related data. So the Process of organizing this data into tables is actually referred to as normalization.

Stored Procedure :

Its nothing but a set of T-SQL statements combined to perform a single task of several tasks. Its basically like a Macro so when you invoke the Stored procedure, you actually run a set of statements.

Example of Stored Procedure :

sp_helpdb , sp_who2, sp_renamedb are a set of system defined stored procedures. We can also have user defined stored procedures which can be called in similar way.

Trigger :

Triggers are basically used to implement business rules. Triggers is also similar to stored procedures. The difference is that it can be activated when data is added or edited or deleted from a table in a database.

View :

If we have several tables in a db and we want to view only specific columns from specific tables we can go for views. It would also suffice the needs of security some times allowing specfic users to see only specific columns based on the permission that we can configure on the view. Views also reduce the effort that is required for writing queries to access specific columns every time.

When queries are run against a db, an index on that db basically helps in the way the data is sorted to process the query for faster and data retrievals are much faster when we have an index.

Types of Indexes :

There are basically two types of indexes that we use with the SQL Server. Clustered and the Non-Clustered.

Cursors :

Well cursors help us to do an operation on a set of data that we retreive by commands such as Select columns from table. For example : If we have duplicate records in a table we can remove it by declaring a cursor which would check the records during retreival one by one and remove rows which have duplicate values

Use of DBCC commands :

DBCC stands for database consistency checker. We use these commands to check the consistency of the databases, i.e., maintenance, validation task and status checks.

Use of SQL Profiler :

SQL Profiler utility allows us to basically track connections to the SQL Server and also determine activities such as which SQL Scripts are running, failed jobs etc..

Linked Server :

Linked Servers is a concept in SQL Server by which we can add other SQL Server to a Group and query both the SQL Server dbs using T-SQL Statements.