SQL Server 2008 represents a sizable jump forward in
scalability, performance, and usability for the DBA, developer, and
business intelligence (BI) developer. It is no longer unheard of to
have 20-terabyte databases running on a SQL Server. SQL Server
administration used to just be the job of a database administrator
(DBA), but as SQL Server proliferates throughout smaller companies,
many developers have begun to act as administrators as well.
Additionally, some of the new features in SQL Server are more
developer-centric, and poor configuration of these features can
result in poor performance. SQL Server now enables you to manage
the policies on hundreds of SQL Servers in your environment as if
you were managing a single instance. We've provided a
comprehensive, tutorial-based book to get you over the learning
curve of how to configure and administer SQL Server 2008.
Whether you're an administrator or developer using SQL Server,
you can't avoid wearing a DBA hat at some point. Developers often
have SQL Server on their own workstations and must provide guidance
to the administrator about how they'd like the production
configured. Oftentimes, they're responsible for creating the
database tables and indexes. Administrators or DBAs support the
production servers and often inherit the database from the
developer.
This book is intended for developers, DBAs, and casual users who
hope to administer or may already be administering a SQL Server
2008 system and its business intelligence features, such as
Integration Services. This book is a professional book,
meaning the authors assume that you know the basics about how to
query a SQL Server and have some rudimentary concepts of SQL Server
already. For example, this book does not show you how to create a
database or walk you through the installation of SQL Server using
the wizard. Instead, the author of the installation chapter may
provide insight into how to use some of the more advanced concepts
of the installation. Although this book does not cover how to query
a SQL Server database, it does cover how to tune the queries you've
already written.
The first ten chapters of the book are about administering the
various areas of SQL Server, including the developer and business
intelligence features. Chapter 1 briefly covers the architecture of
SQL Server and the changing role of the DBA. Chapters 2 and 3 dive
into best practices on installing and upgrading to SQL Server 2008.
Managing your SQL Server database instance is talked about in
Chapter 4. This chapter also describes some of the hidden tools you
may not even know you have.
Once you know how to manage your SQL Server, you can learn in
Chapter 5 how to automate many of the redundant monitoring and
maintenance tasks. This chapter also discusses best practices on
configuring SQL Server Agent. Chapters 6 and 7 cover how to
properly administer and automate many tasks inside of the Microsoft
business intelligence products, such as Integration Services and
Analysis Services. Developers will find that Chapter 8 is very
useful, as it covers how to administer the development features,
such as SQL CLR. Chapter 9 explains how to secure your SQL Server
from many common threats and how to create logins and users.
Chapter 10 covers how to create a SQL Server project and do proper
change management in promoting your scripts through the various
environments. It also covers the Policy-Based Management framework
in SQL Server.
Chapters 11 through 15 make up the performance tuning part of
the book. Chapter 11 discusses how to choose the right hardware
configuration for your SQL Server in order to achieve optimal
performance. After the hardware and operating system is configured,
Chapter 12 shows you how to optimize your SQL Server instance for
the best performance. Chapter 13 describes how to monitor your SQL
Server instance for problematic issues such as blocking and
locking. Chapters 14 and 15 discuss how to optimize the T-SQL that
accesses your tables and then how to index your tables
appropriately.
Chapters 16 through 20 consist of the high-availability chapters
of the book. Chapter 16 covers how to use the various forms of
replication, while database mirroring is covered in Chapter 17.
Classic issues and best practices with backing up and recovering
your database are discussed in Chapter 18. Chapter 19 dives deeply
into the role of log shipping in your high-availability strategy,
and Chapter 20 presents a step-by-step guide to clustering your SQL
Server and Windows 2008 server.
This edition of the book covers all the same great information
we covered in the last book, and we've added loads of new content
for SQL Server 2008, which adds numerous new features to improve
the DBA's life. In short, the new version of SQL Server focuses on
improving your efficiency, the scale of your server, and the
performance of your environment, so you can do more in much less
time, and with fewer resources and people. This means you can
manage many servers at one time using Policy-Based Management,
scale your I/O load using compression, and collect valuable
information about your environment using data collectors, to name
just a few key new features.
To follow the examples in this book, you will need to have SQL
Server 2008 installed. If you wish to learn how to administer the
business intelligence features, you need to have Analysis Services
and the Integration Services components installed. You need a
machine that can support the minimum hardware requirements to run
SQL Server 2008; and you also need the
AdventureWorks2008 and
AdventureWorksDW2008 databases installed. Instructions
for accessing these databases can be found in the ReadMe file on
this book's Web site.
Some features in this book (especially in the high-availability
part) require the Enterprise or Developer Edition of SQL Server. If
you do not have this edition, you will still be able to follow
through some of the examples in the chapter with Standard
Edition.