Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Unleashed

The industry’s most complete, useful, and up-to-date guide to SQL Server 2014.

You’ll find start-to-finish coverage of SQL Server’s core database server and management capabilities: all the real-world information, tips, guidelines, and examples you’ll need to install, monitor, maintain, and optimize the
most complex database environments. The provided examples and sample code provide plenty of hands-on opportunities to learn more about SQL Server and create your own viable solutions.

Four leading SQL Server experts present deep practical insights for administering SQL Server, analyzing and optimizing queries, implementing data warehouses, ensuring high availability, tuning performance, and much more. You will benefit from their behind-the-scenes look into SQL Server, showing what goes on behind the various wizards and GUI-based tools. You’ll learn how to use the underlying SQL commands to fully unlock the power and capabilities of SQL Server.

Writing for all intermediate-to-advanced-level SQL Server professionals, the authors draw on immense production experience with SQL Server. Throughout, they focus on successfully applying SQL Server 2014’s most powerful capabilities and its newest tools and features.

Detailed information on how to…

• Understand SQL Server 2014’s new features and each edition’s capabilities and licensing
• Install, upgrade to, and configure SQL Server 2014 for better performance and easier management
• Streamline and automate key administration tasks with Smart Admin
• Leverage powerful new backup/restore options: flexible backup to URL, Managed Backup to Windows Azure, and encrypted backups
• Strengthen security with new features for enforcing “least privilege”
• Improve performance with updateable columnstore indexes, Delayed Durability, and other enhancements
• Execute queries and business logic more efficiently with memoryoptimized tables, buffer pool extension, and natively-compiled stored procedures
• Control workloads and Disk I/O with the Resource Governor
• Deploy AlwaysOn Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances to achieve enterprise-class availability and disaster recovery
• Apply new Business Intelligence improvements in Master Data Services, data quality, and Parallel Data Warehouse

Ray Rankins is owner and president of Gotham Consulting Services, Inc. (http://www.gothamconsulting.com), near Saratoga Springs, New York. Ray has been working with Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server for more than 27 years and has experience in database administration, database design, project management, application development, consulting, courseware development, and training. He has worked in a variety of industries, including financial, manufacturing, health care, retail, insurance, communications, public utilities, and state and federal government. His expertise is in database performance and tuning, query analysis, advanced SQL programming and stored procedure development, database design, data architecture, and database application design and development, with recent specialization in Sybase to SQL Server migrations. Ray’s presentations on these topics at user group conferences have been very well received. Ray is coauthor of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Unleashed, Sybase SQL Server 11 Unleashed, and Sybase SQL Server 11 DBA Survival Guide, all published by Sams Publishing. As an instructor, Ray brings his real-world experience into the classroom, teaching courses on SQL, advanced SQL programming and optimization, database design, database administration, and database performance and tuning. Ray can be reached at rrankins@gothamconsulting.com.

Paul Bertucci is the founder of Data by Design, LLC (www.dataxdesign.com), a global database consulting firm with offices in the United States and Paris, France. He recently spent 6 years as the Chief Architect and Director of the global Shared Services team for Autodesk, Inc. running BI/DW/ODS, Big Data, Identity Management, SOA, Integration (EAI & ETL), MDM, Collaboration/Social, SaaS application platforms, and Enterprise Architecture teams. Prior to Autodesk, he was the Chief Data Architect at Symantec for 4 years. He is also co-founder and CTO for Diginome, Inc. (www.diginome.com), a data provenance/integrity software company. Paul has more than 30 years of experience with database design, data architecture, big data, data replication, performance and tuning, master data management (MDM), data provenance/DataDNA, distributed data systems, data integration, high-availability, enterprise architecture, identity management, SOA, SaaS, and systems integration for numerous Fortune 500 companies, including Intel, Coca-Cola, Apple, Toshiba, Lockheed, Wells Fargo, Safeway, Sony, Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems, Sybase, Symantec, Veritas, and Honda, to name a few. He has authored numerous database articles, data standards, and high-profile database courses, such as Sybase’s “Performance and Tuning” and “Physical Database Design” courses. Other Sams Publishing books that he has authored include the highly popular Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed, Teach Yourself ADO.NET in 24 Hours, Microsoft SQL Server High Availability, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed, and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Unleashed. Mr. Bertucci is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as Informatica World, Oracle World, and the MDM Summit, and at Microsoft-oriented conferences such as SQL Saturday’s, Silicon Valley Code-Camp, PASS conferences, Tech Ed’s, and SQL Server User Groups. He has deployed numerous systems with Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, Postgres, MySQL, NoSQL, Paraccel, Hadoop and Oracle database engines, and he has designed/architected several commercially available tools in the database, data modeling, performance and tuning, data integration, digital DNA, and multidimensional planning spaces. Paul just finished a major “Master Data Management for Big Data” project with Intel Corporation that deployed MDS (with Profisee’s Maestro) in a data mastering as a service architecture. Paul received his formal education in computer science and electrical engineering from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). He lives in the great Pacific Northwest (Oregon) with his five children: Donny, Juliana, Nina, Marissa, and Paul Jr. Mr. Bertucci can be reached at pbertucci@dataxdesign.com or Bertucci@Alum.CalBerkeley.Org.

Chris Gallelli is the president of CGAL Consulting Services, Inc. His company focuses on consulting services in the areas of database administration, database tuning, advanced stored procedure development, Integration Services, Powershell development and database programming using Microsoft Visual Studio. Chris has more than 20 years of experience with SQL Server or Sybase and more than 25 years in the field of information technology. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in business administration from Union College. Chris currently lives near Albany, New York, with his lovely wife, Laura, and two beautiful daughters, Rachael and Kayla. Other Sams Publishing books that he has coauthored include Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Unleashed, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Unleashed. Chris can be reached at cgallelli@gmail.com.

Alex T. Silverstein is owner and chief technologist of Unified Digital Group, LLC (http://unifieddigital.com), a custom software development firm headquartered near Saratoga Springs, New York. He specializes in designing high-availability software systems using SQL Server and Microsoft .NET. Alex has more than 18 years of experience providing application development, database administration, and training services worldwide to a variety of industries. He was also a coauthor of previous editions of this book. You can reach Alex anytime via email at alex@unifieddigital.com.