Kimberly L. Tripp and Paul S. Randal

This class has three primary goals (for almost all topics/modules): planning, practice/implementation and post-mortem - with the largest emphasis on designing/implementing the RIGHT solution. Questions that you must ask are: How do you choose technologies to fit requirements and effectively use key features of SQL Server 2005/2008? How does your technology/choice affect workload performance?

Only after an in-depth plan is developed should you move on to actual implementation. So what are the areas that you need to consider?

• Architecting for Availability
• Architecting for Performance
• Maintaining Performance and Availability

And just to be clear, this is not a high-level class on planning. This is an intense, in-depth class encompassing structures, internals, technologies and solutions. Planning is a critical part of performance, high-availability, database maintenance and disaster recovery - but the most-often disregarded.

Performance tuning spans many areas within SQL Server from database creation to database design to the code you execute (ad-hoc or procedural). A single magic bullet does not exist (indexing is the closest thing to a magic bullet for some queries). However, to achieve a truly scalable and reliable database it takes a variety of best practices - from database creation (including file structure and placement) to table design and creation (using vertical and horizontal partitioning techniques) to system architecture (including disaster recovery planning and implementation) to ongoing maintenance. Whether you're trying to achieve high performance for a few users or scale to support thousands, there are numerous areas that you can tune to improve performance - proactively. But, how do you make this a reality?

SQL Server 2005 and 2008 provide a variety of options to help keep your database more available. However, even in the event of a disaster, are you sure you know the best path for recovery - with the least amount of downtime and/or data loss? Putting a well-thought out plan into practice requires a thorough understanding of the technologies, their pitfalls and the effects of many technologies when combined. In terms of architecture, we will start by discussing the most important part of designing an available solution - requirements. Then we'll show how to use requirements to drive a technology decision - not the other way around, which happens so often and results in an inadequate implementation.

No matter how much effort you spend on the design of your database, if you don't maintain it in production then it will suffer from performance and manageability problems - and possibly data loss and/or downtime. The key to availability and performance is well thought-out and automated database maintenance. The final part of the course will discuss maintenance strategies required to keep your carefully designed system available and performing well, plus a primer on recovering from disasters.

If you're planning, or already manage, an enterprise system and want better performance and availability - then this is the place to be!

Module List:

1. Foundations - SQL Server structures and algorithms
2. Architecting for Availability
3. Architecting for Performance
4. Maintaining Performance and Availability

Course Length/Type

Three day instructor led seminar.

£600 with early bird discount, a further 5% discount is using the link above or booking multiple events.