MS2788 Designing High Availability Database Solutions Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Professional database administrators who have three or more years of on-the-job experience administering SQL Server database solutions in an enterprise environment.

The course focuses on teaching experienced database administrators working in enterprise environments to design database solutions that meet the availability needs of their organization. It emphasizes that students should think broadly about high availability, which includes thinking about the database itself and about their entire environment, including business needs; regulatory requirements; and network, systems, and database considerations during design. Students will also learn how to document and test the high availability database solution.

This course provides students with the knowledge and skills to design high availability database solutions using Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Upon couse completion students will be able to:

Normalize databases.
Design a normalized database.
Optimize a database design by denormalizing.
Optimize data storage.
Manage concurrency by selecting the appropriate transaction isolation level.
Select a locking granularity level.
Optimize and tune queries for performance.
Optimize an indexing strategy.
Decide when cursors are appropriate.
Identify and resolve performance-limiting problems.

Before attending this course, students must:

• Have a basic understanding of network architecture. For example, what can fail in a network, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), differing performance characteristics of network components, etc.
 
• Understand the tradeoffs among the different redundant storage types. For example, what RAID levels mean, how it differs from a SAN, etc.
 
• Understand how replication works and how replication is implemented.
 
• Be familiar with reading user requirements and business-need documents. For example, development project vision or mission statements or business analysis reports.
 
• Have monitoring and troubleshooting skills.
 
• Have knowledge of the operating system and platform. Specifically, must understand how hardware can fail, how the operating system integrates with the database, what the platform or operating system can do, and how the interaction between the operating system and the database works.
 
• Have knowledge of application architecture. Specifically, must understand how applications identify servers to connect to, how applications can be designed in three layers, what applications can do, the interactions between applications and the database, interactions between the database and the platform or operating system.
 
• Know how to use:
 
• A monitoring tool
 
• Microsoft Visio (to create infrastructure diagrams)
 
• Be familiar with SQL Server 2005 features, tools, and technologies.
 
• Have a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 credential - or equivalent experience.
 

In addition, it is recommended, but not required, that students have completed:

• Course MS2778, Writing Queries Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Transact-SQL. (E-Learning)
 
• Course MS2779, Implementing a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database.
 
• Course MS2780, Maintaining a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database.
 

Module 1: Selecting the Appropriate High-availability Solution

Module 2: Designing a Clustering Solution

Module 3: Designing a Highly Available Database Storage Solution

Module 4: Designing a Log Shipping Solution

Module 5: Designing a Database Mirroring Solution

Module 6: Designing a Highly Available Solution Based on Replication

Module 7: Combining High-availability Technologies

Module 8: Documenting and Testing a High-availability Strategy