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.