Ahmad Osama works for Pitney Bowes Pvt Ltd as a database engineer and is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. In his day to day job at Pitney Bowes, he works on developing and maintaining high performance on-premises and cloud SQL Server OLTP environments, building CI/CD environments for databases and automation. Other than his day to day work, he regularly speaks at user group events and webinars conducted by the Dataplatformlabs community.

This book is for you if you're a database administrator or database developer who wants to improve the performance of your production environment. Prior experience of working with SQL Server will help you get the most out of this book.

Professional SQL Server High Availability and Disaster Recovery is a fast-paced, practical, hands-on book aimed at experienced administrators. As you progress, you'll find helpful tips and tricks, and useful self-assessment material, exercises, and activities to help benchmark your progress and reinforce what you've learned.

For an optimal student experience, we recommend the following hardware configuration:

You'll also need the following software installed in advance:

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "As discussed earlier, there is an option to compress snapshot files in the .cab format."

A block of code is set as follows:

REM -- Change the variable values as per your environment
SET Publisher=WIN2012R2\SQL2016
SET PublisherDB=WideWorldImporters

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In the View Synchronization Status window, select Start to start the distributor agent."

You will need an Azure account for a few exercises in this book. If you don't have one, create a free account here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/.

The latest version of SQL Server Management Studio can be downloaded from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-2017. Installation instructions are also available on the same web page.

Download the code bundle for the book from the GitHub repository and copy it to the C:\Code folder.

The code bundle for this book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/TrainingByPackt/Professional-SQL-Server-High-Availability-and-Disaster-Recovery.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!