Designing High Availability Database Solutions Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Course objectives:
This three-day instructor-led course provides students with the knowledge and skills to design high availability database solutions using Microsoft SQL Server 2005. 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 is intended for current professional database administrators who have three or more years of on-the-job experience administering SQL Server database solutions in an enterprise environment.

Requirements:
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.
In addition, delegates should know how to use a Monitoring Tool and be familiar with Microsoft Visio and SQL Server 2005 features, tools and technologies.

Course content:
Selecting the Appropriate High-availability Solution

Identifying High-availability Requirements and Constraints

Analyzing High-availability Requirements and Constraints

Determining Appropriate High-availability Solutions
Designing a Clustering Solution

Designing the Platform for Clustering

Designing the SQL Server Cluster Implementation

Designing Recovery Strategies and Test Plans for Database Clustering

Migrating and Upgrading SQL Server Clusters

Designing an Operations Plan for Clustering
Designing a Highly Available Database Storage Solution

Determining Storage Requirements for SQL Server Databases

Determining Storage Requirements for SQL Server Components and Files

Designing Storage Solutions for SQL Server Databases

Designing a Backup and Restore Strategy
Designing a Log Shipping Solution

Introduction to Designing a Log Shipping Solution

Designing Log Shipping Server Roles and Topology

Designing a Log Shipping Upgrade Strategy

Designing an Operations Plan for Log Shipping
Designing a Database Mirroring Solution

Introduction to Designing a Database Mirroring Solution

Designing Database Roles and Topology for Database Mirroring

Converting High-availability Solutions to Database Mirroring
Designing a Highly Available Solution Based on Replication

Introduction to Designing a Replication Solution

Designing a Replication Solution

Designing a Replication Upgrade Strategy

Designing an Operations Plan for Replication

Designing an Operations Plan for Database Mirroring
Combining High-availability Technologies

Evaluating Weaknesses in Each High-availability Technology

Maximizing Availability by Combining High-availability Technologies
Documenting and Testing a High-availability Strategy

Documenting High-availability Solutions

Creating a Test Plan for High-availability Solutions