Course Content
Day 1 – Installation and Configuration
- Editions, licensing and sizing
- Installation and instance configuration
- Storage configuration, sizing tempdb correctly
- Database files, filegroups and growth settings
- Understanding the system databases
- Post-deployment configuration: the settings that really matter
Day 2 – Security
- Authentication: Windows versus SQL Server compared
- Logins, users, roles and permissions
- Schemas and the principle of least privilege
- Encryption: TDE, Always Encrypted, connection encryption
- Ledger tables in SQL Server 2022
- Monitoring and logging, SQL Server Audit
Day 3 – Backup, Recovery, High Availability
- Recovery models and their consequences
- Full, differential and log backups
- Aligning your backup strategy with your own requirements: RPO and RTO
- Practising recovery, including point-in-time recovery
- Overview of Always On availability groups
- Log shipping and replication: when they still make sense
- The Link feature to Azure SQL Managed Instance
Day 4 – Operations and Optimisation
- SQL Server Agent, jobs, alerts and notifications
- Maintenance plans: index maintenance, statistics, integrity checks
- Monitoring with Extended Events and Query Store
- Reading execution plans and finding bottlenecks
- Index strategy: missing and redundant indexes
- Analysing locks and blocking
- Migration and upgrade: approach and pitfalls
- Workshop on your own problem cases
