Many would argue that the single, most important job of a SQL Server database administrator is to be able to recover your database in the event of loss or damage. Pro SQL Server Disaster Recovery helps you meet that goal by showing you how to think about and plan for potential problems. You’ll learn to anticipate and reduce the likelihood of a disaster, and to mitigate the effects of a disaster when one does occur. Perhaps most importantly, you’ll learn how to prepare so that you can return a system to its normal state quickly, ensuring system availability and the continued success and operation of your business.

Many SQL Server features and technologies are, or can be put to good use in disaster recovery planning. In this book, you’ll learn about powerful tools and features – such as Database Snapshots and Mirroring – for data backup and disaster recovery that are present in SQL Server 2005, and that are enhanced in SQL Server 2008. Also covered are common issues to expect when using these features. This book explores your options by examining the technical details of disaster recovery features and then applying that knowledge to practical scenarios.

There’s a human side to disaster recovery planning as well. Like few other activities, disaster recovery planning requires that you work closely with a wide variety of people from all across your organization. People skills are as critical to disaster recovery planning as technical skills, and perhaps more so. This book does not leave you in the dark, but provides sound advice on how to keep disaster recovery planning projects on track, how to avoid dangerous scope creep, and how to work effectively with the variety of personality types that you will encounter.

Disaster recovery planning is really about sleep. When you get the call at 3:00 am that your database is lost, don’t wake up with that icy feeling in your veins. Instead wake up with confidence that you have a plan in place, a plan that you’ve practiced, that management has bought into, a plan that you can execute even while halfasleep to get your database, your company, and your job back on track.

What you’ll learn

This book shows you how to implement an effective disaster recovery strategy for SQL Server 2005 databases. It covers:

• Realworld examples of data loss and what might have been done to prevent it
• A systematic, problembased approach to designing a disaster recovery plan
• Pitfalls one might encounter, and how to deal with them
• Team dynamics, and the softside of disaster planning
• New technology in SQL Server 2005 and 2008 that takes disaster recovery beyond the simple backup/recovery plan
• When and why to use disaster recovery features, as opposed to just describing how they work

Who is this book for?

SQL Server database administrators

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The Internet is bigger and better than what a mere browser allows. Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers is for programmers and businesspeople who want to take full advantage of the vast resources available on the Web. There’s no reason to let browsers limit your online experience–especially when you can easily automate online tasks to suit your individual needs.
Learn how to write webbots and spiders that do all this and more:

This groundbreaking book is the first in the Kimball Toolkit series to be product-specific. Microsoft’s BI toolset has undergone significant changes in the SQL Server 2005 development cycle. SQL Server 2005 is the first viable, full-functioned data warehouse and business intelligence platform to be offered at a price that will make data warehousing and business intelligence available to a broad set of organizations. This book is meant to offer practical techniques to guide those organizations through the myriad of challenges to true success as measured by contribution to business value.

Building a data warehousing and business intelligence system is a complex business and engineering effort. While there are significant technical challenges to overcome in successfully deploying a data warehouse, the authors find that the most common reason for data warehouse project failure is insufficient focus on the business users and business problems. In an effort to help people gain success, this book takes the proven Business Dimensional Lifecycle approach first described in best selling The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit and applies it to the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 tool set.

Beginning with a thorough description of how to gather business requirements, the book then works through the details of creating the target dimensional model, setting up the data warehouse infrastructure, creating the relational atomic database, creating the analysis services databases, designing and building the standard report set, implementing security, dealing with metadata, managing ongoing maintenance and growing the DW/BI system. All of these steps tie back to the business requirements. Each chapter describes the practical steps in the context of the SQL Server 2005 platform.

Intended Audience

The target audience for this book is the IT department or service provider (consultant) who is:

• Planning a small to mid-range data warehouse project;
• Evaluating or planning to use Microsoft technologies as the primary or exclusive data warehouse server technology;
• Familiar with the general concepts of data warehousing and business intelligence.

The book will be directed primarily at the project leader and the warehouse developers, although everyone involved with a data warehouse project will find the book useful. Some of the book’s content will be more technical than the typical project leader will need; other chapters and sections will focus on business issues that are interesting to a database administrator or programmer as guiding information.

The book is focused on the mass market, where the volume of data in a single application or data mart is less than 500 GB of raw data. While the book does discuss issues around handling larger warehouses in the Microsoft environment, it is not exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with the unusual challenges of extremely large datasets.

About the Authors

JOY MUNDY has focused on data warehousing and business intelligence since the early 1990s, specializing in business requirements analysis, dimensional modeling, and business intelligence systems architecture. Joy co-founded InfoDynamics LLC, a data warehouse consulting firm, then joined Microsoft WebTV to develop closed-loop analytic applications and a packaged data warehouse.

Before returning to consulting with the Kimball Group in 2004, Joy worked in Microsoft SQL Server product development, managing a team that developed the best practices for building business intelligence systems on the Microsoft platform. Joy began her career as a business analyst in banking and finance. She graduated from Tufts University with a BA in Economics, and from Stanford with an MS in Engineering Economic Systems.

WARREN THORNTHWAITE has been building data warehousing and business intelligence systems since 1980. Warren worked at Metaphor for eight years, where he managed the consulting organization and implemented many major data warehouse systems. After Metaphor, Warren managed the enterprise-wide data warehouse development at Stanford University. He then co-founded InfoDynamics LLC, a data warehouse consulting firm, with his co-author, Joy Mundy. Warren joined up with WebTV to help build a world class, multi-terabyte customer focused data warehouse before returning to consulting with the Kimball Group. In addition to designing data warehouses for a range of industries, Warren speaks at major industry conferences and for leading vendors, and is a long-time instructor for Kimball University. Warren holds an MBA in Decision Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a BA in Communications Studies from the University of Michigan.

RALPH KIMBALL, PH.D., has been a leading visionary in the data warehouse industry since 1982 and is one of today’s most internationally well-known authors, speakers, consultants, and teachers on data warehousing. He writes the “Data Warehouse Architect” column for Intelligent Enterprise (formerly DBMS) magazine.

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The business world is a competitive market and big businesses make extremely large amounts of money. So how can you as an entrepreneur and small business person compete with this . . . ?

. . . with Niche Marketing of course!

As an entrepreneur and small business owner, you have the ability to find a perfect niche market that the large businesses have overlooked, don’t have time for or wouldn’t be profitable enough for them. And whether it’s a service or product, you can capitalize on areas where people are eager to buy and willing to spend whatever money is necessary to get what they want.

“Mastering Niche Marketing” is the most complete single-volume guide to developing a unique business. It includes step-by-step, easy to follow strategies and techniques that will assist in identifying an idea in demand, creating a product, and how to promote it – making money in the process! Here is a small sample of what you ll discover within the pages of this book:

Discover 2 mistakes that inexperienced individuals fail to do when attempting to choose a potentially profitable niche market. Warning: You’re doomed to fail if you do not fully grasp the explanation.

Having difficulties coming up with a niche idea? Drastically improve your brainstorming sessions with these 9 thought-provoking questions!

Determining the profitability of your niche market is crucial to the success of your business, so before you accept any financial risk with your business – learn 15 of the most common fees that new business owners tend to forget about.

Difficulties finding a profitable market? Here are 9 tested and effective business models that’ll prevent you from having to re-invent the wheel so you can start generating a passive income stream!

Discover 11 proven money-making methods that ll result in your customers gladly ‘handing over’ their money using the ‘oldest trick’ in the book. Integrate it properly within your sales process and this will be how you make the bulk of your profits.

9 highly proven techniques you can use to persuade your visitors to click through to your site, thus improving your traffic and increasing your potential for sales.

Understand this aspect about your customers and it ll result in their loyalty to you for a lifetime as they will continually purchase from you again and again.

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There’s no easier, faster, or more practical way to learn the really tough subjects

SQL Demystified explains how to use SQL (Structured Query Language)–the ubiquitous programming language for databases. Readers will learn to create database objects, add and retrieve data from a database, and modify existing data. This self-teaching guide comes complete with key points, background information, quizzes at the end of each chapter, and even a final exam. Simple enough for beginners but challenging enough for advanced students, this is a lively and entertaining brush-up, introductory text, or classroom supplement.

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