Like other RDBMS technologies, SQL Server is primarily built around a row-based table structure that connects related data elements in different tables to one another, avoiding the need to redundantly store data in multiple places within a database. Inside SQL Server's architecture - How SQL Server works SQL Server is tied to Transact-SQL ( T-SQL), an implementation of SQL from Microsoft that adds a set of proprietary programming extensions to the standard language. Like other RDBMS software, Microsoft SQL Server is built on top of SQL, a standardized programming language that database administrators ( DBAs) and other IT professionals use to manage databases and query the data they contain.

Microsoft SQL Server is one of the three market-leading database technologies, along with Oracle Database and IBM's DB2. Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) that supports a wide variety of transaction processing, business intelligence and analytics applications in corporate IT environments.

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