When you work with SQL Server you probably know a thing or two about indexes. The difference between clustered and non-clustered. May you have heard about b-tree structures and now a thing or two about pages and extents.

But do you really know what is inside SQL Server? How data is stored? And maybe more interesting, why data is stored this way. And how is this done with other systems like Oracle, Postgres and Mongo? And how are data types inside your application related to SQL data types.

In this session I will guide you through the world of pages and how data is stored. What is the difference between varchar and nvarchar? Or how are dates stored? And, how does this relate to collations or codepages. Your backend api might use json in UTF-8 format, yet SQL Server might use a completely different format. I will show you how this works and help you to get a little bit more understanding of the storage engine.

If you are interested in getting to know just a little bit more about how data is stored on disk this session is for you.