INFO: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Operations Guide (829024)

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• Chapter 1 - Introduction
  This chapter contains an outline of the whole Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Operations guide. It also describes the intended audience for the guide and how to use the guide. This chapter includes a summary of each chapter that appears in the guide and a description of Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF). It briefly discusses MOF and how the MOF process is related to operations tasks and life cycle of Microsoft SQL Server 2000. This chapter also includes a section about other resources that you can use. The resources section includes book titles and links to Web sites.
• Chapter 2 - Change, Configuration, and Release Management
  Chapter 2 categorizes changes by type and by level. It also describes the change-management process. The discussion in this chapter begins when a change is proposed and continues through the development step, the testing step, and the release step. This chapter also discusses the documentation that Microsoft recommends that you keep in a run book.
• Chapter 3 - Security Administration
  Chapter 3 discusses critical security issues that Microsoft recommends that database administrators (DBA) and SQL Server administrators address. The security issues include user and account management issues, password practices, use of permissions and roles, and management in various settings such as on linked servers. This chapter emphasizes best practices.
• Chapter 4 - System Administration
  Chapter 4 discusses system administration and basic administration tasks that Microsoft recommends that every DBA perform. These tasks are organized based on whether they are performed daily, weekly, or monthly. This chapter does not discuss monitoring, performance tuning, or troubleshooting. These topics are discussed in chapter 5 and chapter 7. The following topics are included in chapter 4:
  • Stopping and restarting the server
  • Backup and restore issues
  • Password and other security issues
  • Moving data by using Data Transformation Services (DTS) instead of by using log shipping, replication, backup, restore, the bcp utility, or bulk insert
  • Issues that are related to log shipping, clustering, memory management and Address Windowing Extensions (AWE)
• Chapter 5 - Monitoring and Control
  Chapter 5 discusses the following two monitoring strategies:
  • proactive monitoring
  • exception monitoring
  This chapter lists key counters and describes the steps to create a log file. Specialized monitoring situations that describe how to distinguish clustering problems from hardware problems, such as in a clustering environment, are discussed at the end of this chapter.
• Chapter 6 - Capacity and Storage Management
  Chapter 6 describes the DBA's responsibilities for configuring and maintaining physical storage components to meet the requirements of capacity, throughput, and performance.
• Chapter 7 - Problem and Incident Management
  Chapter 7 describes the procedures that are used for problem and incident management. This chapter contains a review of log files and tools for documenting problem resolution. It also contains a section about how to identify problems that appear to be database problems but that might be connectivity problems. This section also contains information about when clustering is used and about how to identify problems that might be clustering issues.
• Chapter 8 - Service Management
  Chapter 8 discusses the process of negotiating a service level agreement. It discusses the individuals who should be involved in this process and the points that you should include in a service level agreement.