The software to play with

General info on Windows Server 2003

Online resources by exam objective

• Analyze CPU requirements.
• Analyze the current configuration.
• Analyze memory requirements.
• Forecast and incorporate anticipated growth requirements into the capacity requirements.

• Choose a version and edition of the operating system.
• Choose a version of SQL Server 2005.
• Choose a CPU type.
• Choose memory options.
• Choose a type of storage.

• Design transaction log storage.
• Design backup file storage.
• Decide where to install the operating system.
• Decide where to place SQL Server service executables.
• Specify the number and placement of files to create for each database.

• Decide how many databases to create.
• Decide on the placement of system databases for each instance.
• Decide on the physical storage for the tempdb database for each instance.
• Decide on the number of instances.
• Decide on the naming of instances.
• Decide how many physical servers are needed for instances.
• Establish service requirements.
• Specify instance configurations.

• Gather information to analyze the dispersed environment.
• Identify potential consolidation problems.
• Create a specification to consolidate SQL Server databases.
• Design a database migration plan for the consolidated environment.
• Test existing applications against the consolidated environment.

• Analyze business requirements.
• Gather business and regulatory requirements.
• Decide how requirements will impact choices at various security levels.
• Evaluate costs and benefits of security choices.
• Decide on appropriate security recommendations.
• Inform business decision-makers about security recommendations and their impact.
• Incorporate feedback from business decision-makers into a design.

• Decide which authentication system to use.
• Design Active Directory organizational units (OUs) to implement server-level security policies.
• Ascertain the impact of authentication on a high-availability solution.
• Establish the consumption of enterprise authentication.
• Ascertain the impact of enterprise authentication on service up-time requirements.

• Develop a password policy.
• Develop an encryption policy.
• Specify server accounts and server account rights.
• Specify the interaction of the database server with antivirus software.
• Specify the set of running services and disable unused services.
• Specify the interaction of the database server with server-level firewalls.
• Specify a physically secure environment for the database server.

• Analyze the risk of attacks to the server environment and specify mitigations.

• Specify logins.
• Select SQL Server server roles for logins.
• Specify a SQL Server service authentication mode.
• Design a secure HTTP endpoint strategy.
• Design a secure job role strategy for the SQL Server Agent Service.
• Specify a policy for .NET assemblies.

• Specify database users.
• Design schema containers for database objects.
• Specify database roles.
• Define encryption policies.
• Design DDL triggers.
  • John Papa explains the point of DDL Triggers as well as several other enhancments. "DDL triggers are useful when tracking or securing the creation and modification of database objects or changes to the database server."
  • Jeffrey Juday's Using DDL Triggers to Manage SQL Server 2005 is a good intro to the subject. From that:
    • DDL Triggers are at either DB level or Server level (not object level like DML)
    • DDL triggers do not support INSTEAD OF
    • lack the Inserted and Deleted tables
    • Understand scope (DB vs Server)

• Design a permissions strategy.
• Analyze existing permissions.
• Design an execution context.
• Design column-level encryption.
• Design security for CLR objects in the database.
• Designing a Physical Database
• Modify an existing database design based on performance and business requirements.
• Ensure that a database is normalized.
• Allow selected denormalization for performance purposes.
• Ensure that the database is documented and diagrammed.

• Decide if partitioning is appropriate.
• Specify primary and foreign keys.
• Specify column data types and constraints.
• Decide whether to persist computed columns.
• Specify physical location of tables, including file groups and a partitioning scheme.

• Design file groups for performance.
• Design file groups for recoverability.
• Design file groups for partitioning.

• Design indexes for faster data access.
• Design indexes to improve data modification.
• Specify physical placement of indexes.

• Establish where to store database source code.
• Isolate development and test environments from the production environment.
• Define procedures for moving from development to test.
• Define procedures for promoting from test to production.
• Define procedures for rolling back a deployment.
• Document the database change control procedures.
• Designing a Database Solution for High Availability
• Select high-availability technologies based on business requirements.
• Analyze availability requirements.
• Analyze potential availability barriers.
• Analyze environmental issues.
• Analyze potential problems related to processes and staff.
• Identify potential single points of failure.
• Decide how quickly the database solution must fail over.
• Choose automatic or manual failback.
• Analyze costs versus benefits of various solutions.
• Combine high-availability technologies to improve availability.

• Analyze the current environment.
• Ascertain migration options.
• Choose a migration option.

• Design the RAID solutions for your environment.
• Design a SAN solution.

• Design a Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) implementation.
• Design the cluster configuration of the SQL Server service.

• Design server roles for database mirroring.
• Design the initialization of database mirroring.
• Design a test strategy for planned and unplanned role changes.

• Specify an appropriate replication solution.
• Choose servers for peer-to-peer replication.
• Establish a strategy for resolving data conflicts.
• Design an application failover strategy.
• Design a strategy to reconnect client applications.

• Specify the primary server and secondary server.
• Switch server roles.
• Design an application failover strategy.
• Design a strategy to reconnect client applications.

• Designing a Data Recovery Solution for a Database
• Specify data recovery technologies based on business requirements.
• Analyze how much data the organization can afford to lose.
• Analyze alternative techniques to save redundant copies of critical business data.
• Analyze how long the database system or database can be unavailable.

• Specify the number and location of devices to be used for backup.
• Specify what data to back up.
• Specify the frequency of backup.
• Choose a backup technique.
• Specify the type of backup.
• Choose a recovery model.

• Document the sequence of possible events.
• Create a disaster decision tree that includes restore strategies.
• Establish recovery success criteria.
• Validate restore strategies.

• Designing a Strategy for Data Archiving
• Select archiving techniques based on business requirements.
• Gather requirements that affect archiving.
• Ascertain data movement requirements for archiving.
• Design the format of archival data.
• Plan for data archival and access.
• Specify the destination for archival data.
• Specify the frequency of archiving.
• Decide if replication is appropriate.
• Establish how to access archived data.

• Design the topology of replication for archiving data.
• Specify the publications and articles to be published.
• Specify the distributor of the publication.
• Specify the subscriber of the publication.
• Design the type of replication for archiving data.
• Section 2

Troubleshoot physical server performance.

• Identify poorly performing queries.
• Analyze a query plan to detect inefficiencies in query logic.
• Maintain and optimize indexes.
• Enforce appropriate stored procedure logging and output.
• Troubleshoot concurrency issues.

• Diagnose causes of failures. Failure types include database failures, physical server failures, and SQL Server service failures.

• Recover from a failure of SQL Server 2005.

• Create a job dependency diagram.
• Manage the maintenance of database servers.

Raj Vasant describes 3 ways to deploy reports to Reporting Services. (Requires SqlServerCentral registration)

• Establish the business requirements for quality.
• Create queries to inspect the data.
• Use checksum.
• Clean the data.

• Reconcile data conflicts.
• Make implicit constraints explicit.
• Assign data types to control characteristics of data stored in a column.

• Set up and manage linked servers.

• Design alerts.
• Design a maintenance plan to monitor health, latency, and failures.
• Verify replication.
• Design a plan to resolve replication conflicts.
• Design a plan to modify agent profiles.
• Tune replication configuration.

• Verify that database change control procedures are being followed.
• Identify all database objects related to a particular deployment.
• Designing a Strategy to Manage and Maintain Database Security

• Design a strategy to audit Windows account permissions.
• Design a strategy to audit SQL Server service access.
• Maintain a strategy to assign the appropriate minimum level of privileges.
• Maintain an encryption strategy that meets business requirements.
• Design a strategy to apply service packs and security updates.
• Configure the surface area.

• Verify the existence and enforcement of account policies.
• Verify SQL Server login authentication.
• Verify permissions on SQL Server roles and accounts.

• Prepare for and respond to SQL Server injection attacks.
• Prepare for and respond to denial-of-service attacks that are specific to SQL Server.
• Prepare for and respond to virus and worm attacks that are specific to SQL Server.
• Prepare for and respond to internal attacks that are specific to SQL Server.
  
  
  
  
  
  If you know of more resources which should be listed here, please email a link to me. I very much appreciate other resources to study and will be sure to acknowledge you on this page.