Summary

This chapter provides a description of the typical administration tasks applied to SQL-NS instances. Administering a SQL-NS instance involves both monitoring it for problems and maintaining it in the face of changes.

SQL-NS provides three main information sources you can monitor to keep track of the health of an instance: entries in the Application Event Log, a set of performance counters, and database reports. This chapter explains the information you can obtain from these sources and the tools used to access them.

Maintaining an instance involves tasks that you do regularly to ensure trouble-free operation and tasks that you do to implement required changes. This chapter describes cleanup tasks that must be done regularly and techniques for making changes to applications as needed.

Another important part of administering an instance is performing regular backups. This chapter provides information on backing up the parts of a SQL-NS instance and restoring them again to an operational state.

The techniques and tools described in this chapter will help you keep your instance running efficiently, reliably, and securely in its deployment environment. Chapter 15 builds on this material by providing a guide to troubleshooting common problems that you might encounter.