How This Book Is Structured

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 2005. Managing your SQL Server database instance is talked about in Chapter 4. This chapter also goes over 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 like SQL CLR. Chapter 9 talks about 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.

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 to perform optimally. 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 shows you how to monitor your SQL Server instance for problematic issues like 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 for backing up and recovering your database are discussed in Chapter 18. Chapter 19 dives deeply into what the role of log shipping is in your high-availability strategy, and Chapter 20 presents a step-by-step guide to clustering your SQL Server.