Administering a SQL Database Infrastructure

Module 1: SQL Server Security

Protection of data within your Microsoft SQL Server databases is essential and requires a working knowledge of the issues and SQL Server security features. This module describes SQL Server security models, logins, users, partially contained databases, and cross-server authorization.

Module 2: Assigning Server and Database Roles

Using roles simplifies the management of user permissions. With roles, you can control authenticated users’ access to system resources based on each user’s job function—rather than assigning permissions user-by-user, you can grant permissions to a role, then make users members of roles. Microsoft SQL Server includes support for security roles defined at server level and at database level.

Module 3: Authorizing Users to Access Resources

In the previous modules, you have seen how Microsoft SQL Server security is organized and how sets of permissions can be assigned at the server and database level by using fixed server roles, user-defined server roles, fixed database roles, and application roles.

Module 4: Protecting Data with Encryption and Auditing

When configuring security for your Microsoft SQL Server systems, you should ensure that you meet any of your organization’s compliance requirements for data protection. Organizations often need to adhere to industry-specific compliance policies, which mandate auditing of all data access.

Module 5: Recovery Models and Backup Strategies

One of the most important aspects of a database administrator’s role is ensuring that organizational data is reliably backed up so that, if a failure occurs, you can recover the data.

Module 6: Backing Up SQL Server Databases

In the previous module, you learned how to plan a backup strategy for a SQL Server system. You can now learn how to perform SQL Server backups, including full and differential database backups, transaction log backups, and partial backups. In this module, you will learn how to apply various backup strategies.

Module 7: Restoring SQL Server 2016 Databases

In the previous module, you learned how to create backups of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 databases. A backup strategy might involve many different types of backup, so it is essential that you can effectively restore them. You will often be restoring a database in an urgent situation.

Module 8: Automating SQL Server Management

The tools provided by Microsoft SQL Server make administration easy when compared to some other database engines. However, even when tasks are easy to perform, it is common to have to repeat a task many times. Efficient database administrators learn to automate repetitive tasks.

Module 9: Configuring Security for SQL Server Agent

Other modules in this course have demonstrated the need to minimize the permissions that are granted to users, following the principle of “least privilege.” This means that users have only the permissions that they need to perform their tasks.

Module 10: Monitoring SQL Server with Alerts and Notifications

One key aspect of managing Microsoft SQL Server in a proactive manner is to make sure you are aware of problems and events that occur in the server, as they happen.

Module 11: Introduction to Managing SQL Server by using PowerShell

This module looks at how to use Windows PowerShell with Microsoft SQL Server. Businesses are constantly having to increase the efficiency and reliability of maintaining their IT infrastructure; with PowerShell, you can improve this efficiency and reliability by creating scripts to carry out tasks. PowerShell scripts can be tested and applied multiple times to multiple servers, saving your organization both time and money.

Module 12: Tracing Access to SQL Server with Extended events

Monitoring performance metrics provides a great way to assess the overall performance of a database solution. However, there are occasions when you need to perform more detailed analysis of the activity occurring within a Microsoft SQL Server instance—to troubleshoot problems and identify ways to optimize workload performance. SQL Server Extended Events is a flexible, lightweight event-handling system built into the Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine.

Module 13: Monitoring SQL Server

The Microsoft SQL Server Database Engine can run for long periods without the need for administrative attention. However, if you regularly monitor the activity that occurs on the database server, you can deal with potential issues before they arise. SQL Server provides a number of tools that you can use to monitor current activity and record details of previous activity.

Module 14: Troubleshooting SQL Server

Database administrators working with Microsoft SQL Server need to adopt the important role of troubleshooter when issues arise—particularly if users of business-critical applications that rely on SQL Server databases are being prevented from working. It is important to have a solid methodology for resolving issues in general, and to be familiar with the most common issues that can arise when working with SQL Server systems.

Module 15: Importing and Exporting Data

While a great deal of data residing in a Microsoft SQL Server system is entered directly by users who are running application programs, there is often a need to move data in other locations, to and from SQL Server.