Chapter 4 -- Designing a Microsoft SQL Server System

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Chapter 4

Before you even begin loading the operating system and Microsoft SQL Server, you should have a good idea how you want to design your SQL Server system. By carefully designing your SQL Server system, you can avoid costly downtime caused by having to either rebuild the system or reinstall SQL Server with different options. In this chapter, you will learn how to design a SQL Server system. In this book, the SQL Server system is the hardware and software that make up the computer that is actually running the SQL Server database. By comparison, when we talk in general about a system, we mean all of the hardware and software that make up all of the computers working on behalf of the user in order to access data from one or more SQL Server databases.

This chapter also gives you a brief introduction to the versions of Microsoft Windows 2000 and SQL Server that you might choose to install. Finally you will learn about the types of front-end applications that your company might purchase or create in order to access SQL Server and about how the application architecture can affect the future scalability and performance of your system.