Search
Home
Articles
Backup
Books
Certification
FAQ
Products
Replication
Scripts
Seminars
Training
TSQL
MSDN Fourms
Philippine SSUG
Fort Worth SSUG
Oklahoma City SSDG
Resume
MHS Enterprises
BlowFrog Software
FilAm Software
AcrylicAcetate.com
Bargain Humidors
Western Humidor

Upgrading Your Skills to SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008

Myra Canterbury and Simmons Corporation have provided us with a location in Dallas as well as Mark Valentino and Freese & Nichols Inc. have provided facilities in Fort Worth for our ongoing SQL Server seminar series. This multi-part series of seminars are designed to fit into your busy schedule. Each seminar is focused on a specific topic and architected for 1/2 day. All content is developed and delivered by industry experts. No marketing fluff. Only hard core technical information. Please contact us with any questions.

Seminar Date Location Speaker Hours Register # Seats Left # Wait List

Location Facility
Dallas, TX Hackberry Creek Country Club, Las Colinas, TX
Richardson, TX Simmons Corporation, 320 Terrace Avenue, Richardson, TX
Fort Worth, TX Freese and Nichols, Inc., 4055 International Plaza, Fort Worth, TX

Upgrading to SQL Server 2008
Based upon our 300+ upgrade manual, the first published for SQL Server 2008, this seminar will walk you through all of the necessary considerations for upgrading your environments from either SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008. Due to time constraints, this seminar focus solely on the relational engine and SSIS. This seminar will cover:
  • SQL Server Upgrade Advisor
  • Upgrade Methodologies
  • Security
  • Failover Clustering
  • Log Shipping architectures
  • Replication architectures
  • T-SQL
  • Full Text
  • SSIS
  • Tools

 SQL Server 2008 Admin Jumpstart
A complete overview of all of the administration capabilities available in SQL Server 2008. Along with many other topics, this seminar will cover:
  • Declarative Management Framework
  • Resource governors
  • Security
  • Installation enhancements
  • Data collector

 SQL Server 2008 Development Jumpstart
A complete overview of all of the development capabilities available in SQL Server 2008. Along with many other topics, this seminar will cover:
  • New data types
  • MERGE
  • Plan Guides
  • Table valued parameters
  • Bitmap filters
  • Change data capture
  • Multi-valued inserts
  • Performance data repository
  • Data compression
  • Sparse columns
  • Spatial data
  • Grouping sets

 SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence Overview
SQL Server 2008 includes a powerful array of Business Intelligence capabilities. This seminar will functionality overviews for:
  • Analysis Services
  • Integration Services
  • Reporting Services

 SQL Server 2008 High Availability Features
SQL Server 2008 extended and enhanced the many new features added to high availability in SQL Server 2005 such as Database Mirroring, Database Snapshots, and Partitioning. Designed and developed by an industry expert who has been deploying high availability solutions for over a decade as well as several early adopter deployments of SQL Server 2008 features, this seminar will provide an overview of the technology choices now available in SQL Server 2008. We will cover:
  • Enhancements to the backup/restore engine targeted at HA
  • Failover Clustering
  • Database Mirroring
  • Database Snapshots
  • Log Shipping
  • Partitions
  • Replication

 SQL Server 2008 Security
SQL Server 2008 provides a multi-layer security platform which manages access control from connection to the instance, objects that can be accessed, and all the way through to viewing of data within a table. By layering each of the security sub-systems, data can be secured from the client access all the way through to the information within the backup tapes you have stored off-site. This seminar will cover:
  • Windows security structures
  • Password policies
  • Logins, Groups, and Roles
  • Certificates, Symmetric keys, Asymmetric keys, and Encryption
  • Endpoints
  • Schemas
  • Permissions
  • Execution context
  • Signatures
  • Auditing
  • Masking metadata
  • Logon triggers

 SQL Server 2008 Partitioning
As databases grow and utilization levels increase, more stress is placed on the hardware as well as administrative operations. No where is this more prevalent than with archiving operations and loading of data warehouses. The partitioning features within SQL Server 2008 will redefine the way data is loaded and archived within your databases to allow extremely large amounts of data to be manipulated without creating contention. This seminar will cover:
  • Partitioning architecture
  • Partitioned tables
  • Partitioned indexes
  • Utilizing partitioning to spread and isolate disk I/O
  • Loading data into warehouses without contention
  • Archiving data from operational systems without contention
  • Management and manipulation of partitions

 SQL Server 2008 Disaster Recovery
The biggest challenge IT staffs face is not in keeping a system online, but in rapidly recovering when an outage occurs. SQL Server 2008 introduces important advances in the ability to recover at a very granular level while still ensuring maximum availability during restore operations. This seminar will cover:
  • Planning for factors which lead to outages
  • Designing recovery strategies
  • Backup strategies
  • Recovering corrupted pages
  • Recovery scenarios
  • SAN level backup and restore operations
  • Building a disaster recovery plan
  • The Disaster Recovery Toolkit

 SQL Server 2008 Database Mirroring
Database Mirroring was introduced in SQL Server 2005 as a next generation high availability solution. SQL Server 2008 improves on the core functionality while also providing better performce. It can provide extreme levels of availability as well as transparency to applications for the failover process. We have been working with Database Mirroring since prior to beta 1 of SQL Server 2005 and have more than 7000 Database Mirroring sessions deployed in production environments. This seminar will cover:
  • Database Mirroring Roles
  • Operating Modes
  • Endpoints and Security
  • Deployment
  • Managing failover and failback
  • Leveraging a mirror for reporting
  • Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  • Configuring the mirror for failover
  • Best practices deployment and configuration

 SQL Server 2008 Performance Toolkit
You've attended the gazillionth presentation on performance tuning and you are still no closer to making it a reality. The problem always comes down to time. You spend so much time gathering data to determine the problem that you usually only have time to fix those issues that are causing applications to not function. In this seminar, we will explore the wealth of information that is available to DBAs, how to capture it, what to capture, what not to capture, and most importantly, how to let the system tell you where issues are at. By the end of this discussion, you should be armed with all of the knowledge necessary to build systems that can be used during all phases of development to help continuously eliminate performance issues while dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to find the problems. These techniques can be applied just effectively for SQL Server 6.5, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2 as they can be SQL Server 2008. This seminar will cover:
  • Profiler
  • System Monitor (PerfMon)
  • Waitstats
  • UMS operations
  • File I/O
  • Trace analysis
  • Dynamic Management Views and Functions
  • The SQL Server Performance Toolkit
  • SQL Server 2008 performance data repository
  • SQL Server 2008 Data Collector

 SQL Server 2008 Failover Clustering
Failover clustering is one of the most prominent high availability features within the SQL Server platform. Clustering provides automatic failover capbilities in the event of a hardware failure. Due to the failover mechanisms used, failovers are virtually transparent to applications. During this seminar, we will build an entire SQL Server cluster from the ground up within a Virtual Server environment. This seminar will cover:
  • Clustering components
  • Windows clustering
  • SQL Server clustering
  • Network configurations
  • Multi-instance issues
  • Best practice deployment and configuration

 SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services
The report - loved by business users, hated by IT staffs. You can spend hours and days putting reports together only to have the rejected by users, because a column didn't line up or there was a piece of text missing from the header. Reports also cause business users much grief, because IT staffs cannot produce the reports front line users need to manage and react to changing business conditions. Reporting Services breaks down this barrier by allowing IT staffs to focus on the management of reports while also allowing end users to generate and publish reports on their own. This seminar will cover:
  • Reporting Services architecture
  • Report Designer
  • Reporting wizards
  • Generating and deploying reports
  • Managing reports
  • Scheduling reports
  • Report versions - embedding data
  • Report security
  • Sharepoint integration

 SQL Server 2008 Integration Services
SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, provides enterprise class ETL capability. Within this seminar, we will explore many of the basic capabilities of SSIS in order to get you up and running in building maintainable SSIS packages for your environment. This seminar will cover:
  • Package designer interface overview
  • SSIS architectural considerations
  • architecting flexible packages
  • Connection managers
  • Sources and destinations
  • Package tasks
  • Expressions
  • Variables
  • Data Flow task
  • Error handlers
  • Package configurations
  • Security and deployments
  • Data change capture

 SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - OLAP
An overview of all of the OLAP capabilities delivered through Analysis Services in SQL Server 2008. This seminar will cover:
  • Dimensions, attributes, and hierarchies
  • Measures and Measure Groups
  • KPIs
  • Perspectives
  • Building/Deploying cubes
  • Incremental data updates
  • Write-backs
  • Security
  • Deployment considerations - local vs. server based

 SQL Server 2008 Monitoring and Management
DBAs and companies upgrade to SQL Server 2005 for a wide variety of reasons, each one of them is due to some feature or another that looks promising to the business. After doing the first upgrade, DBAs very quickly want every single instance of SQL Server upgraded for one reason - monitoring and management. The instrumentation throughout the database engine isn't a feature that is frequently talked about in any of the marketing material. It is the most compelling feature for DBAs. What used to take hours, days, and weeks to figure out, now takes minutes and seconds. There is one downside to this however, information overload. How do you know where to find things, what each means, and how can you leverage them effectively. This seminar will cover:
  • SQL Server metadata
  • Dynamic Management Views
  • Dynamic Management Functions
  • SQL Server Monitoring

 SQL Server 2008 Replication
One of the most misunderstood and under utilized features that ship with SQL Server is replication. This seminar will peel away the mysteries surrounding replication as well as eliminate all of the scare tactics employed by several SQL Server professionals. The replication engine is a very simple and straight forward feature which provides powerful capabilities to all of your applications. This seminar will cover:
  • Replication terminiology
  • Architectural overview
  • replication components
  • Comparison of replication methods
  • Implementation details
  • Design and management considerations

 Jumpstart on Integration Services for SQL Server 2005
SQL Server Integration Services, SSIS, is a major upgrade of the ETL capability which ships with SQL Server 2005. Initially viewed as a mere "upgrade" to DTS, many have started up the BI Dev Studio only to wind up completely confused and not know where to begin. SSIS is really a completely new ETL tool shipping in SQL Server 2005 whose only similarity to DTS is that it can move data. Within this seminar, we will explore many of the basic capabilities of SSIS in order to get you up and running in building maintainable SSIS packages for your environment. This seminar will cover:
  • Package designer interface overview
  • SSIS architectural considerations
  • architecting flexible packages
  • Connection managers
  • Sources and destinations
  • Package tasks
  • Expressions
  • Variables
  • Data Flow task
  • Error handlers
  • Package configurations
  • Security and deployments

 Jumpstart on Reporting Services for SQL Server 2005
The report - loved by business users, hated by IT staffs. You can spend hours and days putting reports together only to have the rejected by users, because a column didn't line up or there was a piece of text missing from the header. Reports also cause business users much grief, because IT staffs cannot produce the reports front line users need to manage and react to changing business conditions. Reporting Services breaks down this barrier by allowing IT staffs to focus on the management of reports while also allowing end users to generate and publish reports on their own. This seminar will cover:
  • Reporting Services architecture
  • Report Designer
  • Reporting wizards
  • Generating and deploying reports
  • Managing reports
  • Scheduling reports
  • Report versions - embedding data
  • Report security

 Jumpstart on Analysis Services for SQL Server 2005 - OLAP
An overview of all of the OLAP capabilities delivered through Analysis Services in SQL Server 2005. This seminar will cover:
  • Dimensions, attributes, and hierarchies
  • Measures and Measure Groups
  • KPIs
  • Perspectives
  • Building/Deploying cubes
  • Incremental data updates
  • Write-backs
  • Security
  • Deployment considerations - local vs. server based

Discontinued seminars - can still be taught upon request
 Upgrading to SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005 provides a significant expansion in features and capabilities. Companies wishing to upgrade SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000 to the new platform will need to ensure that any incompatibilities are addressed either prior to or shortly after an upgrade. Designed and delivered by one of the co-authors of Microsoft's prescriptive guidance for upgrading to SQL Server 2005, this seminar will prepare you for seamless upgrades of your infrastructure. This seminar will cover:
  • SQL Server Upgrade Advisor
  • Upgrade Methodologies
  • Security
  • Failover Clustering
  • Log Shipping architectures
  • Replication architectures
  • T-SQL
  • Full Text
  • DTS
  • Tools

 SQL Server 2005 High Avalability Features
SQL Server 2005 has added many new features to high availability such as Database Mirroring, Database Snapshots, and Partitioning. Designed and developed by an industry expert who has been deploying high availability solutions for over a decade as well as several early adopter deployments of SQL Server 2005 features, this seminar will provide an overview of the technology choices now available in SQL Server 2005. We will cover:
  • Enhancements to the backup/restore engine targeted at HA
  • Failover Clustering
  • Database Mirroring
  • Database Snapshots
  • Log Shipping
  • Partitions
  • Replication

 SQL Server 2005 Security
The entire security infrastructure in SQL Server 2005 has been rewritten. The multi-layer security platform provides access control from connection to the instance, objects that can be accessed, and all the way through to viewing of data within a table. By layering each of the security sub-systems, data can be secured from the client access all the way through to the information within the backup tapes you have stored off-site. This seminar will cover:
  • Windows security structures
  • Password policies
  • Logins, Groups, and Roles
  • Certificates, Symmetric keys, Asymmetric keys, and Encryption
  • Endpoints
  • Schemas
  • Permissions
  • Execution context
  • Signatures
  • Auditing
  • Masking metadata

 SQL Server 2005 Partitioning
As databases grow and utilization levels increase, more stress is placed on the hardware as well as administrative operations. No where is this more prevalent than with archiving operations and loading of data warehouses. The new partitioning features within SQL Server 2005 will redefine the way data is loaded and archived within your databases to allow extremely large amounts of data to be manipulated without creating contention. This seminar will cover:
  • Partitioning architecture
  • Partitioned tables
  • Partitioned indexes
  • Utilizing partitioning to spread and isolate disk I/O
  • Loading data into warehouses without contention
  • Archiving data from operational systems without contention
  • Management and manipulation of partitions

 Database Mirroring in SQL Server 2005
Database Mirroring is one of the flagship features in SQL Server 2005 designed as a next generation high availability solution. It can provide extreme levels of availability as well as transparency to applications for the failover process. We have been working with Database Mirroring since prior to beta 1 of SQL Server 2005 and have more than 6000 Database Mirroring sessions deployed in production environments. This seminar will cover:
  • Database Mirroring Roles
  • Operating Modes
  • Endpoints and Security
  • Deployment
  • Managing failover and failback
  • Leveraging a mirror for reporting
  • Monitoring and Troubleshooting
  • Best practices deployment and configuration

 SQL Server Failover Clustering
Failover clustering is one of the most prominent high availability features within the SQL Server platform. Clustering provides automatic failover capbilities in the event of a hardware failure. Due to the failover mechanisms used, failovers are virtually transparent to applications. During this seminar, we will build an entire SQL Server cluster from the ground up within a Virtual Server environment. This seminar will cover:
  • Clustering components
  • Windows clustering
  • SQL Server clustering
  • Network configurations
  • Multi-instance issues
  • Best practice deployment and configuration

 Disaster Recovery with SQL Server 2005
The biggest challenge IT staffs face is not in keeping a system online, but in rapidly recovering when an outage occurs. SQL Server 2005 introduces important advances in the ability to recover at a very granular level while still ensuring maximum availability during restore operations. This seminar will cover:
  • Planning for factors which lead to outages
  • Designing recovery strategies
  • Backup strategies
  • Recovering corrupted pages
  • Recovery scenarios
  • SAN level backup and restore operations
  • Building a disaster recovery plan
  • The Disaster Recovery Toolkit

 SQL Server Performance Toolkit
You've attended the gazillionth presentation on performance tuning and you are still no closer to making it a reality. The problem always comes down to time. You spend so much time gathering data to determine the problem that you usually only have time to fix those issues that are causing applications to not function. In this seminar, we will explore the wealth of information that is available to DBAs, how to capture it, what to capture, what not to capture, and most importantly, how to let the system tell you where issues are at. By the end of this discussion, you should be armed with all of the knowledge necessary to build systems that can be used during all phases of development to help continuously eliminate performance issues while dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to find the problems. These techniques can be applied just effectively for SQL Server 6.5, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2 and they can be SQL Server 2005. This seminar will cover:
  • Profiler
  • System Monitor (PerfMon)
  • Waitstats
  • UMS operations
  • File I/O
  • Trace analysis
  • Dynamic Management Views and Functions
  • The SQL Server Performance Toolkit

 Introduction to Service Broker for SQL Server 2005
Service Broker, at its most basic level, packages a request broker into SQL Server. Service Broker enables a new class of multi-part, asynchronous business transactions which can span multiple systems without needing to implement specific software from other vendors. By leveraging the industrial strength request broker already present in every SQL Server 2005 instance that is installed, businesses can enjoy significant savings on software licenses along with a streamlining of development practices. This seminar will cover:
  • Service Broker architecture
  • Messages
  • Queues
  • Conversations
  • Automated processing
  • Security
  • Message durability, reliability, and recoverability

Michael R. Hotek

All content on this site, except where noted, represents an original work of Michael R. Hotek and is protected by applicable copyright laws. The SQL Server FAQ is the sole work of Neil Pike. No page, portion of a page, or download may be used for commercial purposes in whole or in part without the express, written permission of the applicable author.