70-461 Session 5: Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Course details

This course is the foundation for the Microsoft Certificate 70-461: "Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012".

In Sessions 1 and 2, we learned all about dates, strings and number data types and DML statements. In sessions 3 and 4, we created views, procedures, triggers, constraints and combining datasets.

We'll will now be creating aggregate queries, working through objective 9 of the exam 70-461. We'll be reviewing the ranking functions ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK and NTILE. We'll look at the 8 analytic functions news to SQL Server 2012, such as LAG, LEAD, FIRST_VALUE and LAST_VALUE.

We'll look at alternative ways of grouping and adding totals, using ROLLUP, CUBE, GROUPING SETS and GROUPING_ID. We'll also look at the geometry and geography data types, plotting locations on a grid, together with functions and aggregates.

No prior knowledge other than what we covered in Sessions 1 to 4 is required. This course builds on the knowledge previously gained in those previous sessions.

There are regular quizzes to help you remember the information.

Once finished, you will know what how to write ranking functions, analytic functions, grouping sets and spatial aggregates, and we'll have expanded on our current knowledge of T-SQL.