Course: SQL Administration 2012 for developers

In this course we’ll start on configuring and testing SQL Server, we will introduce you to the SQL Server engines and learn how they process incoming requests to the database to get the results you expect in the most efficient ways possible. We will take a good look at the 3 main resources that SQL Server uses, the CPU, Memory and Disk I/O. We will even reveal a 4th resource that that is commonly forgotten about. We will see how each of these affects the way SQL Server performs, and how the proper configuration of each helps to ensure a stable environment. Then we will cover planning for your SQL Server database’s growth. Then we will use Microsoft’s free SQLIO tool to test the I/O of our SQL Server’s hard drives. We will then show you how to determine where performance maxes out based on the results of SQLIO.

During this course we will look into various methods to automate processes in SQL Server. We will go through configuring Database Mail so that you, as the DBA, can receive automated alerts from the server when something goes wrong. We’ll set up Operators to receive general alerts, custom alerts and then we’ll create, based on performance conditions, queries that run for long periods of time. We’ll review the DBCC commands that are critical to ensuring database integrity and providing valuable insight into what’s going on inside the SQL Server system. Then we will take advantage of the new SQL 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Group ability to let us offload some maintenance tasks from our primary servers to secondary servers. Next we are going to look at File Groups and show how we can use them to manage our data files and potentially improve the performance of queries and requests to SQL databases. Next we will create a new SQL 2012 Contained database and move it to a new server showing you just how easy it is to relocate databases using this feature. We will finish up by going over a large number of configuration options available to us in SQL Server. We will cover general and advanced settings and detail how each affects SQL Server.

Security is becoming a concern of everyone. In this course we will dive into some of the features in SQL Server 2012 that relate to security. We will take a look at the encryption keys that SQL Server creates and uses, along with certificates, to protect everything from cell level data to entire databases. Then we will see how Transparent Data Encryption can help to quickly bring a database into compliance with most regulations and requirements. We will also see what exactly is required to move an encrypted database to a new server without losing any data. User defined server roles is a new SQL 2012 feature that makes administration easier when it comes to security. We will go over this and even create our own Server Role for members of the data team. Next we will look at ways to protect individual objects in your databases using security permissions and show how, as the DBA, you can test your configuration using the Execute As capabilities of SQL Server. Next we are going to look into the Resource Governor and Policy Based management. We will go through the Components of the Resource Governor and show how you can use this great feature of Enterprise edition to classify incoming connections and identify specific users or groups that are using excessive resources on the server. We will then look at the Policy Group Management feature of SQL Server. We will create policies that check and enforce naming conventions and ensure proper backups are being configured on your servers.

In this course we are going to go through a few topics covering some basic optimizing and troubleshooting in SQL 2012. We will discuss Trace flags which are used to alter the behavior of SQL Server. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it is dangerous and sometimes it is just bizarre what they do. We will review the use of trace flags to capture deadlock information so we can more efficiently troubleshoot the cause. Then we will look into blocks, a common issue in SQL server and go over how to determine which process is blocking others and how to resolve it. Next we will then go through a series of DMVs that are quite useful in optimizing and troubleshooting SQL Server. I even share some DMV based queries I use all the time to check indexes fragmentation and usage along with a query to identify the most expensive queries in your database.

SQL Server 2012 offers a variety of High Availability and Disaster recovery options. The biggest change from previous versions is the introduction of AlwaysOn. In this course we will look at how AlwaysOn integrates high-availability and disaster recovery into a total solution. We will see how AlwaysOn is based on Windows Failover Clusters to protect the entire Instance, while Availability groups provide options to improve database availability and resource use. Then we’ll cover log shipping as well as mirroring and replication, which are still useful in some scenarios for disaster recovery. We will go through each of these, and even configure separate log shipping, mirroring and transactional replication. Next we will go through the various recovery models SQL supports and we will discuss the various backup scopes and types available. We will look into how these all work together to allow you to create a complete disaster recovery strategy. We will also show how having proper backups allow us to perform actions such as restoring a database to a point in time. We even fix a corrupted page by referencing a proper backup all while keeping the database online to users.