Lecture 7-- Locate SQL Server documentation

Having official documentation at your fingertips will be invaluable as you start your journey into learning SQL server. You can find the docs for SQL server 2017 by visiting the url docs.microsoft.com/sql. Now I'd highly recommend that you bookmark this page as the documentation resources here will be extremely helpful as you continue to learn the inner workings of SQL server and the language that you'll use to interact with the server, transact SQL. In the past, this documentation resource was called books online, so here and there, you might see a reference to that even though Microsoft has officially dropped the books online moniker in favor of the more standardized SQL server documentation name.

Specifically on this page, we have links to the SQL server 2017 technical documentation, a link to the SQL server management studio resources, and if we scroll down a little bit, we'll see the transact SQL reference docs here. This is probably the link that I spend the most time with. Clicking on the T-SQL link will give an overview of the help topic and clicking on statements, for instance down here on the left will display a guide for all the statements that are available, some of which we'll see later in the course.

The technical documentation resources are extremely helpful and it might be beneficial to make these documentation available for offline viewing for those occasions when your computer doesn't have internet access, such as when you're traveling or doing field work. We can do that right inside of management studio. Let's go ahead and minimize my browser, then I'll go ahead and open up management studio. If you're still logged in, go ahead and log out and then click on the icon here to reconnect to my server. I'm going to log in using my Windows authentication account, most likely here underneath the authentication method, I press connect and then it will come up to the help menu.

From there, I'll choose add and remove help content. That'll open up this window and after a few moments of loading, it'll display a list of all the help documents that you can download for offline viewing. Let's go ahead and scroll down to the SQL server section. I recommend adding the one for SQL server management studio, so I click the add link next to that. We'll also add in the SQL server technical documentation as well as the transact SQL reference. Once you've made all your selections, come down and press the update button.

That'll download the files and add them into your help viewer. Then, anytime you want to review the technical docs, whether you have internet access or not, simply come up to the help menu. Then we'll go ahead and close this window. From then on, anytime you want to review the technical docs, whether you have internet access or not, simply come up to the help menu and choose view help. You'll either see the web page if you have internet access, or the downloaded help files if you don't.