SQL Server Components with Details: Introduction to SQL Server

SQL Server contains a number of components, provides specific services and support to the clients connected to the server. The following figure depicts the components of SQL Server

As shown in the preceding figure, SQL Server consists of the following core components, described in this article:

• Database Engine
• Integration Services
• Analysis Services
• Reporting Services

Database Engine

It provides support to store, query, process, and secure data on the database server. The database engine contains databases and database objects, such as tables and procedures. This database engine allows you to create and manage database objects.

Services provided by database engine:

• Service Broker: Provides support for asynchronous communication between clients and the database server, enabling reliable query processing. The client application sends a request to the database server and continues to work. The requests sent by the client are queued up at the server, in case the server is not available to process the request immediately. Server Broker ensures that the request is processed whenever the server is available.
• Replication: Allows you to copy and distribute data and database objects from one database server to another. After replicating data, the SQL Server allows you to synchronize different databases to maintain data located at different locations around the world. All the servers store common data.
• Full-text search: To implement fast and intelligent search in large database by allowing you to search records containing certain words and phrases. You can search for different forms of a specific word, such as ‘produce’, ‘produces’, or ‘production’. In addition, you can search for synonyms of a given word, such as ‘garment’, ‘cloth’, or ‘fabric’.
• Notification services: Allows you to generate and send notification messages to the users or administrators about any event. For example, the database administrator should be notified when a database object is created or deleted. The notification messages can be sent to a variety of devices, such as computers of mobile devices.

Integration Services

Integration services allow you to gather and integrate data from various disparate data sources available in an organization. You can store the data in a consistent format in a common database called the data warehouse.
For example, data in your organization might be stored in different databases, such as Microsoft Access, FoxPro, or text files. You might need to consolidate data from all these sources and save the data in a common set tables on a database server.

The integration services provide a set of tasks that help the developer create data integration projects with minimum lines of code. Data integration allows collation of data from all the data sources in a common format to enable accurate analysis of data.

Analysis Services

Analysis services help in data analysis in a BI application. These applications are built on a data warehouse that contains data consolidated from various data sources. These services provide data mining solutions that are built on data integrated in the data warehouse. Data mining solutions allow the users to query and present data in reports that enable business forecasts, such as expected sales or profit estimates in the next financial year.

Reporting Services

Reporting services provide support to generate comprehensive reports on data in the database engine or in the data warehouse. These services provide a set of tools that help in creating and managing different types of reports in different formats. Using these services, you can create centralized reports that can be saved to a common server and provide secure and restricted access to these reports.