Getting to know your data in SQL Server

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Working through the tables that we have inside our SQL Server database can be a bit of a daunting task. There are over 60 tables in the AdventureWorks2014 database, with the majority of them being dimensional or lookup tables, such as [Person].[CountryRegion], as seen in the following screenshot:

The previous table is basically a lookup for country names associated with a specific code. The next step would be to identify a table to function as the fact table within this schema. That table would be [AdventureWorks2014].[Sales].[SalesOrderHeader].

To see all the columns in the table, run the following script:

SELECT * 
FROM [AdventureWorks2014].[Sales].[SalesOrderHeader] 

As can be seen from the result set, there are several...