SQL Server^® 2008 Skills Upgrade:
Hands-On

Introducing SQL Server 2008 New Features

• Exploring new and enhanced administration and development features
• Upgrading from SQL Server 2005
• SQL Server Management Studio
• Coding with Intellisense

Easing Development with Transact-SQL

Working with new data types

• Date
• Time
• DateTimeOffset
• DateTime2
• HierarchyID

Programming with new statements

• Inserting multiple rows
• Managing GROUP BY queries with GROUPING SETS
• Handling "upserts" with the MERGE statement
• Defining SPARSE columns and filtered indexes

Manipulating geospatial data

• Storing and retrieving geographic information
• Querying data with Spatial Index

Extending beyond relational data

• Enabling the storage and access of binary files with FILESTREAM
• Reading FILESTREAM data from clients

Improving Data Management

Performance and scalability enhancements

• Expanding system hardware with Hot Add CPU and memory
• Compressing backup files on the fly

Allocating processor time and memory

• Specifying resource limits
• Prioritizing workloads with Resource Governor

Policy-Based Management

Establishing policy-based management

• Defining guidelines for SQL Server instances
• Reducing TCO by simplifying administrative tasks

Enforcing policy compliance

• Creating policies and conditions
• Subscribing to policies and applying policies to SQL Servers
• Detecting compliance issues with alerts and notifications

Central Management Servers (CMS)

Administering multiple servers

• Creating a CMS
• Registering server groups to CMS
• Adding SQL servers to CMS groups
• Multiserver management

Working with Central Management Servers

• Issuing queries on CMS groups
• Evaluating policies against CMS groups

Proactively Monitoring Data

Recording modifications

• Configuring Change Tracking
• Logging primary keys for rows that have changed
• Administering performance implications
• Applying the CHANGETABLE function

Implementing Change Data Capture (CDC)

• Enabling CDC for history logging
• Tracking Data Manipulation Language (DML) and Data Definition Language (DDL) statements

Securing Your Data through Encryption

Managing Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

• Creating the database encryption key
• Demystifying the encryption key hierarchy
• Comparing cell-level encryption to TDE

Extensible key management

• Storing keys externally and restoring encrypted data
• Querying and managing encryption key data

Boosting SQL Server Performance

Optimizing I/O performance

• Compressing tables and indexes
• Selecting row or page compression

Collecting performance data

• Creating the MDW database
• Establishing the data collector
• Analyzing data capture from queries
• Reporting on performance bottlenecks

Monitoring with the extended events engine

• Handling events uniformly across SQL Server
• Dynamically inspecting active processes