Book Image

SQL Server 2019 Administrator's Guide - Second Edition

By : Marek Chmel, Vladimír Mužný
Book Image

SQL Server 2019 Administrator's Guide - Second Edition

By: Marek Chmel, Vladimír Mužný

Overview of this book

SQL Server is one of the most popular relational database management systems developed by Microsoft. This second edition of the SQL Server Administrator's Guide will not only teach you how to administer an enterprise database, but also help you become proficient at managing and keeping the database available, secure, and stable. You’ll start by learning how to set up your SQL Server and configure new and existing environments for optimal use. The book then takes you through designing aspects and delves into performance tuning by showing you how to use indexes effectively. You’ll understand certain choices that need to be made about backups, implement security policy, and discover how to keep your environment healthy. Tools available for monitoring and managing a SQL Server database, including automating health reviews, performance checks, and much more, will also be discussed in detail. As you advance, the book covers essential topics such as migration, upgrading, and consolidation, along with the techniques that will help you when things go wrong. Once you’ve got to grips with integration with Azure and streamlining big data pipelines, you’ll learn best practices from industry experts for maintaining a highly reliable database solution. Whether you are an administrator or are looking to get started with database administration, this SQL Server book will help you develop the skills you need to successfully create, design, and deploy database solutions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: Provisioning the SQL Server Environment
4
Section 2: Server and Database Maintenance
9
Section 3: High Availability and the Cloud with SQL Server 2019

Designing a backup strategy

A backup can be understood as a copy of used data pages or a copy of transaction log records. Backups should be done regularly. Backups are needed not only to restore databases in the case of physical or logical failure but for when, for example, we want to make a copy of the database or migrate the database to another SQL Server instance. To have our backups proper and complete, we need to consider the following points:

  • How to configure the database
  • Which types of backups to combine
  • How to use backup strategies in conjunction with database usage

Let's first look at the types of backup supported by SQL Server.

Backup types

SQL server basically supports three main types of backup:

  • Full backup
  • Transaction log backup
  • Differential backup

Each of these types has several variants and we will go through each of them.

Full backup

A full backup is simply a backup ...