SQL Server

The contract for which concurrency anomalies a transaction may observe, traded against how much concurrency the engine allows.

The structure that defines how data is organised in a database: tables, columns, data types, constraints, relationships, and indexes.

Organising tables so that each fact is stored once, reducing redundancy at the cost of more joins.

A data structure maintained alongside a table that makes lookups by specific columns faster, at the cost of slower writes and additional storage.

A named block of SQL (or procedural code) stored in the database and executed on the server, avoiding the round-trip cost of sending each statement from the application.

A column or set of columns that uniquely identifies every row in a table, enforced by a unique index and a NOT NULL constraint.

A constraint that links a column in one table to the primary key of another, enforcing referential integrity so that orphan rows cannot exist.

A sequence of operations that either all succeed (commit) or all fail (rollback), guaranteeing that the database moves from one consistent state to another.

Code that the database executes automatically when a specific event occurs on a table - typically an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE.

A named query stored in the database that behaves like a virtual table - it does not hold data itself but runs its defining query each time it is read.