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Exam 70-450 - PRO: Designing, Optimizing, and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008

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Overview

Language(s): English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese (Simplified)
Audience(s): IT Professionals
Technology: Microsoft SQL Server 2008
Type: Proctored Exam

Audience Profile

This exam is targeted at the professional level SQL Server 2008 Database Administrator. It tests your ability to make appropriate design and technology choice considerations for your SQL Server 2008 installations.

Candidates for this exam work in an environment in which Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is used for database solutions. Candidates should have at least three years of experience administering databases in an enterprise-level organization and designing, deploying, optimizing, maintaining, and supporting database service life cycle. Candidates should also have experience with the following:

  • Defining high-availability solutions
  • Data distribution
  • Automating administrative tasks (for example, checking db stats, backups)
  • Maintaining administrative tasks (for example, determining index rebuild time, file groups for backup)
  • Defining security solutions
  • Monitoring and troubleshooting the database server
  • Performance optimization (for example, physical tuning, including hardware, operating system, instance-level tuning), PerfMon
  • Designing and executing deployments
  • Deployments and migration
  • Defining the infrastructure (for example, storage, hardware, and number of servers or instances)

Credit Toward Certification

Exam 70-450: PRO: Designing, Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administrative Solution Using Microsoft SQL Server 2008: counts as credit toward the following certification(s):

  • Microsoft Certified IT Professional: Database Administrator 2008

Note This preparation guide is subject to change at any time without prior notice and at the sole discretion of Microsoft. Microsoft exams might include adaptive testing technology and simulation items. Microsoft does not identify the format in which exams are presented. Please use this preparation guide to prepare for the exam, regardless of its format.

Skills Measured

Designing a SQL Server Instance and a Database Solution (14%)

  • Design for CPU, memory, and storage capacity requirements.

    This objective may include but is not limited to: RAID, calculating table size, IO throughput, transaction per second, data compression, non-uniform memory access (NUMA), tempdb capacity

  • Design SQL Server instances.

    This objective may include but is not limited to: instance configuration, surface area configuration, CPU affinity, memory allocation, max degree of parallelism (MAXDOP), collation

  • Design physical database and object placement.

    This objective may include but is not limited to: heap and index placement, filestream, data and log files, filegroups, partition placement, large object placement, full text catalog

  • Design a migration, consolidation, and upgrade strategy.

    This objective may include but is not limited to: multi-instance considerations, SQL Server version upgrade, instance and database collation, server-level and instance-level objects, service pack application

Designing a Database Server Security Solution (15%)

  • Design instance authentication

    This objective may include but is not limited to: choosing authentication type, logon triggers, regulatory requirements

  • Design instance-level security configurations

    This objective may include but is not limited to: Windowsservice accounts, filestream, proxy, credentials, instance-level permissions, certificate and key management, endpoint security, using SSL certificates, TCP ports

  • Design database, schema, and object security paramaters

    This objective may include but is not limited to: users, roles, certificate and key management, Service broker, Common Language Runtime (CLR), ownership chains

  • Design a security policy and an audit plan

    This objective may include but is not limited to: Policy-Based Management Framework, security functions, sp_helprotect, catalog views, extended events, notifications

  • Design an encryption strategy

    This objective may include but is not limited to: Transparent Data Encryption, encrypting protected data, certificate and key management, filestream

Designing a Database Solution for High Availability (15%)

  • Design a failover clustering solution

    This objective may include but is not limited to: cluster resource group, cluster setup considerations, number of nodes, service accounts

  • Design database mirroring

    This objective may include but is not limited to: whether to use a witness server, Windows Server considerations, suspend vs. stop, automatic or manual failover, automatic page repair, database snapshots for reporting, managing instance-level objects

  • Design a high-availability solution that is based on replication

    This objective may include but is not limited to: different replication types, topologies, recover from replication failure, synchronization, health monitoring

  • Design a high-availability solution that is based on log shipping

    This objective may include but is not limited to: manage instance-level objects, changing roles, reporting secondary instance for reporting, monitor server, reinitializing, consistency check on secondary instance

  • Select high-availability technologies based on business requirements

    This objective may include but is not limited to: failover clustering, database mirroring, log shipping, replication

Designing a Backup and Recovery Solution (20%)

  • Design a backup strategy

    This objective may include but is not limited to: recovery model, compression, choosing backup types, scheduling, backup media, file and filegroups backup, verifying backups, key management, mirrored backups, cluster considerations

  • Design a recovery strategy

    This objective may include but is not limited to: page, file, filegroup, partial and online restores, orphan users, instance rebuild, encryption considerations, handling media failures, transaction logs, point in time and mark recovery, filestreams

  • Design a recovery test plan

    This objective may include but is not limited to: log shipping, replication, hardware considerations, scheduling a database restore test, handling high availability failures

Designing a Monitoring Strategy (13%)

  • Design a monitoring solution at the operating system level

    This objective may include but is not limited to: system monitor counters, event logs, dynamic management views and functions, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), remote monitoring, analyze results

  • Design a monitoring solution at the instance level

    This objective may include but is not limited to: instance, database and object monitoring, data collection, event notifications, dynamic management objects, analyze results

  • Design a solution to monitor performance and concurrency

    This objective may include but is not limited to: Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC), locking, blocking, deadlocks, dynamic management objects, index utilization, tracing, analyze

Designing a Strategy to Maintain and Manage Databases (14%)

  • Design a maintenance strategy for database servers

    This objective may include but is not limited to: rebuild for page-level compression, index and heap maintenance, partition management, statistics

  • Design a solution to govern resources

    This objective may include but is not limited to: Resource Governor (CPU, memory, number of requests per second; resource pools, resource groups), query governor

  • Design policies by using Policy-Based Management

    This objective may include but is not limited to: designing policies and conditions

  • Design a data compression strategy

    This objective may include but is not limited to: row vs. page level, update frequency, compression ratio, compressing partitions, specific indexes

  • Design a management automation strategy

    This objective may include but is not limited to: SQL Server PowerShell, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), SQL Server Agent, event notifications, DDL triggers

Designing a Strategy for Data Distribution (9%)

  • Administer SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages

    This objective may include but is not limited to: design security for accessing packages, troubleshoot and restart package, schedule package execution, deploy packages to same or different instances

  • Design a strategy to use linked servers

    This objective may include but is not limited to: security, providers, distributed transactions

  • Design a replication strategy for data distribution

    This objective may include but is not limited to: selecting replication types, conflict resolution, health monitoring, horizontal and vertical partitioning

Preparation Materials

Learning Plans and Classroom Training

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