If you need to deploy, manage, or secure Microsoft SQL Server 2008, this is the complete, fast-paced, task-based reference you’ve been searching for. Authored by a world-class expert on SQL Server in the enterprise, this book goes far beyond the basics, taking on the complex tasks that DBAs need to make the most of Microsoft’s flagship database platform. SQL Server MVP, Ross Mistry presents proven techniques for SQL Server 2008 installation, upgrades, backup/restore, data transfer, indexing, high availability, security, and much more. He draws on extensive testing in high-profile production environments to offer step-by-step solutions and powerful tips you won’t find anywhere else. Every chapter begins with a section identifying SQL Server 2008’s most significant new improvements, and concludes with a convenient summary of best practices. Each chapter also outlines the benefits of leveraging Windows Server 2008.
Understand how to:
Master DBA tips, tricks, and best practices proven in actual enterprise environments
Install, upgrade or transition to SQL Server 2008.
Harden and Secure an implementation.
Encrypt SQL Server from an end-to-end perspective.
Implement high availability–and leverage SQL Server 2008’s major improvements to failover clustering and database mirroring
Save time with SQL Server 2008’s new policy-based management tools
Performance tune and troubleshoot a SQL Server 2008 environment.
Optimize application performance and manage workloads with the powerful new Resource Governor
Implement Performance Studio, maintenance plans, Transparent Data Encryption and much more…
Bonus Content:
The book is based on Windows Server 2008
Step by step instructions of how to implement a failover cluster on Windows Server 2008
SQL Server PoweShell Administration Tasks
Consolidate and virtualize SQL Server with Hyper-V
Step by step instructions on how to install Hyper-V
Proactively Monitor SQL Server with Operations Manager
Install Windows Server 2008 certificates to encrypt SQL Server data
About this product: Delve inside the core SQL Server engine and put that knowledge to work with guidance from a team of well-known internals experts. Whether database developer, architect, or administrator, you ll gain the deep knowledge you need to exploit key architectural changes and capture the product s full potential. Discover how SQL Server works behind the scenes, including: What happens internally when SQL Server builds, expands, shrinks, and moves databases How to use event tracking from triggers to the Extended Events Engine Why the right indexes can drastically reduce your query execution time How to transcend normal row-size limits with new storage capabilities How the Query Optimizer operates Multiple techniques for troubleshooting problematic query plans When to force SQL Server to reuse a cached query plan or create a new one What SQL Server checks internally when running DBCC How to choose among five isolation levels and two concurrency models when working with multiple concurrent users
About this product: The Definitive Guide to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
Create and deliver data-rich reports across the enterprise using this complete server-based reporting solution. Written by a member of the original Reporting Services development team, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services covers the entire report-building and distribution process, including data extraction, integration with desktop and Web applications, and end-user access. The book explains how to maximize all of the powerful features, including the new Tablix data format, as well as enhanced performance, scalability, and visualization capabilities.
Install, configure, and customize SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
Create SELECT queries to extract data
Generate reports from the Report Wizard and from scratch
Add charts, images, and gauges
Build reusable report templates
Use the new Tablix data format to create reports with any structure
Export reports to Word, Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, and other formats
Enable end-user access to reports via the Report Server and its Report Manager web interface
Maximize the Business Intelligence Tools in Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Manage, analyze, and distribute enterprise data with help from this expert resource. Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 covers the entire BI lifecycle and explains how to build robust data integration, reporting, and analysis solutions. Real-world examples illustrate all of the powerful BI capabilities of SQL Server 2008. This is your one-stop guide for transforming disparate data into actionable insight for users throughout your organization.
Understand the goals and benefits of business intelligence
Design and create relational data marts and OLAP cubes
Manage Analysis Services databases using BI Development Studio
Cleanse data and populate data marts with SQL Server Integration Services
Take advantage of the flexibility of the Unified Dimensional Model
Manipulate and analyze data using MDX scripts and queries
Use data mining to identify data patterns, correlations, and clustering
Develop and distribute interactive reports with SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
Integrate business intelligence into enterprise applications using ADOMD.NET and the Report Viewer Control
About this product: <>Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed offers comprehensive coverage of SQL Server 2005 that goes beyond the basic syntax and information you’ll find in the product manuals, providing in-depth information derived from the authors’ real-world experience to help you build upon your working knowledge of the product and take your experience and knowledge to a higher level. This book focuses primarily on the information needed by system and database administrators, as well as for users with overlapping duties as both DBA and developer. Included is extensive coverage of the new features and upgraded tools and capabilities of SQL Server 2005, including .NET Framework integration, Integration Services, Service Broker, Database Mirroring and Snapshots, and Reporting Services.
Detailed information on…
Installing, upgrading, and administering SQL Server 2005
Database maintenance, backup, and recovery
Creating and managing tables, views, stored procedures, triggers, and user-defined functions
Database and index design
SQL Server query optimization, and performance monitoring and tuning
Transactions, transaction management, and distributed transactions
SQL Server Management Studio—NEW!
SQL Server Notification Services; Integration Services—NEW!; Analysis Services; Reporting Services—NEW!; Web Services—NEW!
SQL Server Service Broker—NEW!
SQL Server and Microsoft .NET Framework integration, including CLR-based stored procedures, functions, and triggers—NEW!
SQL Server high availability and SQL Server clustering and replication
Database Mirroring—NEW!
Database Snapshots—NEW!
Using XML in SQL Server 2005
SQL Server tools and utilities
CD-ROM includes
8 bonus chapters covering topics such as Notification Services, Service Broker, and Full-Text Search
Code samples, scripts, and sample databases
A PDF version of the entire book
Introduction
Part I Welcome to Microsoft SQL Server
1 SQL Server 2005 Overview
2 What’s New in SQL Server 2005
Part II SQL Server Tools and Utilities
3 SQL Server Management Studio
4 SQL Server Command-Line Utilities
5 SQL Server Profiler
Part III SQL Server Administration
6 SQL Server System and Database Administration
7 Installing SQL Server 2005
8 Upgrading to SQL Server 2005
9 Client Installation and Configuration
10 Security and User Administration
11 Database Backup and Restore
12 Database Mail
13 SQL Server Scheduling and Notification
14 SQL Server High Availability.
15 Replication
16 Database Mirroring
17 SQL Server Clustering
Part IV Database Administration
18 Creating and Managing Databases
19 Creating and Managing Tables
20 Creating and Managing Indexes
21 Implementing Data Integrity
22 Creating and Managing Views in SQL Server
23 Creating and Managing Stored Procedures
24 Creating and Managing User-Defined Functions
25 Creating and Managing Triggers
26 Transaction Management and the Transaction Log
27 Database Snapshots
28 Database Maintenance
Part V SQL Server Performance and Optimization
29 Indexes and Performance
30 Understanding Query Optimization
31 Query Analysis
32 Locking and Performance
33 Database Design and Performance
34 Monitoring SQL Server Performance
Part VI SQL Server Application Development
35 What’s New for Transact-SQL in SQL Server 2005
36 SQL Server and the .NET Framework
37 Using XML in SQL Server 2005
38 SQL Server Web Services
Part VII SQL Server Business Intelligence Features
39 SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
40 SQL Server Integration Services
41 SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
Bonus Chapters on the CD
42 Managing Linked and Remote Servers
43 Configuring, Tuning, and Optimizing SQL Server Options
44 Administering Very Large SQL Server Databases
45 SQL Server Disaster Recovery Planning
46 Transact-SQL Programming Guidelines, Tips, and Tricks
SQL Server 2008 is a first–rate database management system. It offers more capability than any previous release of SQL Server. More than just a classic relational database management system, SQL Server 2008 includes exciting and powerful features that make it useful for everything from large corporate data warehouses to ad hoc departmental databases. You’ll find enhanced support for XML, new support for spatial data, transparent data encryption, a policy–based management system, and more.
Author and developer Robin Dewson will show you the way from beginner to SQL Server 2008 professional. Learn to install SQL Server 2008 and navigate around Management Studio before getting right to the heart of mastering fundamental SQL Server 2008 tasks: creating tables, storing data, securing data, and retrieving it again. Dewson ensures you’ll be fully prepared to use all the basics and create a solid foundation for your own projects.
Don’t forget about backups! Your database will house important data, so backing up is essential to protect yourself from inevitable hardware failure. Dewson walks you through SQL Server 2008’s easy–to–use backup and recovery feature set, giving you the grounding that you need in order to set up a reliable plan for recovery in your own environment.
Learn to use Transact–SQL, a full–blown procedural language that is built right into the database system. Transact–SQL is the key to unlocking everything that SQL Server 2008 has to offer. Using Transact–SQL, you can write centrally encapsulated business logic through the use of stored procedures, automatically trigger processing through the use of triggers, and manipulate data within the server without having to move data back and forth across the network.
Finally, you’ll learn a bit about SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services, a powerful tool that allows enterprise reporting. Reporting Services enables you to develop and serve reports across your organization and even to business partners outside your company. Reporting Services also gives end users the ability to create their own reports, helping them transform business data into valuable, usable information to guide their day–to–day decisions.
What you’ll learn
Install and manage SQL Server on your system.
Create and secure tables.
Store and query data; use indexes to improve query performance.
“Sleep when the wind blows,” because you have a solid backup and recovery process.
Run procedural code inside your database in the form of Transact–SQL procedures and triggers.
Serve up business reports to in–house users and outside business partners via SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.
Who is this book for?
Developers new to SQL Server 2008. If you are just beginning to develop software using SQL Server 2008, or if you are planning to do so in the near future, this book will set you on the road to success.
About the Apress Beginning Series
The Beginning series from Apress is the right choice to get the information you need to land that crucial entry–level job. These books will teach you a standard and important technology from the ground up because they are explicitly designed to take you from “novice to professional.” You’ll start your journey by seeing what you need to knowbut without needless theory and filler. You’ll build your skill set by learning how to put together real–world projects step by step. So whether your goal is your next career challenge or a new learning opportunity, the Beginning series from Apress will take you there—it is your trusted guide through unfamiliar territory!
About this product: Master the foundations of T-SQL with the right balance of conceptual and practical content. Get hands-on guidance including exercises and code samples that show you how to develop code to query and modify data. You ll gain a solid understanding of the T-SQL language and good programming practices, and learn to write more efficient and powerful queries. Discover how to: Apply T-SQL fundamentals, create tables, and define data integrity Understand logical query processing Query multiple tables using joins and subqueries Simplify code and improve maintainability with table expressions Explore pivoting techniques and how to handle grouping sets Write code that modifies data Isolate inconsistent data and address deadlock and blocking scenarios
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.
SQL Server 2008 Query Performance Tuning Distilled presents a direct trouble–shooting methodology for identifying poorly performing stored procedures and queries, isolating the causes of that poor performance, and fixing the underlying problems. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the top causes of poorly performing queries and shows methods for identifying and dealing with the problems in that chapter’s domain. Emphasis is always put upon or placed upon practical methods that you can put to immediate use in your day–to–day work. SQL Server 2008 functionality, tips, and tricks are emphasized in each subject area.
Emphasizes the practical. Does not bury readers in theory.
Gives readers practical techniques to immediately apply in their daily work.
Dedicates a chapter to each of the most common, performance–related problem areas.
What you’ll learn
Identify and fix poorly performing queries that are hurting your business.
Read query execution plans and identify bottlenecks in performance.
Record system performance metrics for trend analysis.
Learn to design databases and write Transact–SQL code to avoid common problems.
Understand what an index is, what it does, and how to build one.
Use industry accepted best practices and understand how to develop your own to arrive at optimal database performance.
Who is this book for
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning Distilled is aimed at anyone writing business–critical Transact–SQL queries, and also at those responsible for the continued good performance of those queries. Developers, database administrators, business intelligence analysts, and any others who develop Transact–SQL queries will find this book an indispensible resource for getting the most out of what SQL Server 2008 has to offer.
This is not an ordinary SQL Server Book. SQL Server MVP Deep Dives brings together the world's most highly-regarded SQL Server experts to create a masterful collection of tips, techniques, and experience-driven best practices for SQL Server development and administration. These SQL Server MVPs-53 in all-each selected a topic of great interest to them, and in this unique book, they share their knowledge and passion with you.
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives is organized into five parts: Design and Architecture, Development, Administration, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence. Within each part, you'll find a collection of brilliantly concise and focused chapters that take on key topics like mobile data strategies, Dynamic Management Views, or query performance. The range of subjects covered is comprehensive, from database design tips to data profiling strategies for BI.
Additionally, the authors of this book have generously donated 100% of their royalties to support War Child International. War Child International is a network of independent organizations, working across the world to help children affected by war. War Child was founded upon a fundamental goal: to advance the cause of peace through investing hope in the lives of children caught up in the horrors of war. War Child works in many different conflict areas around the world, helping hundreds of thousands of children every year. Visit www.warchild.org for more information.