Preparation Guide for Exam 70-444

PRO: Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administration Solution by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005

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	Exam news
	Audience profile
	Credit toward certification
	Preparation tools and resources
	Skills measured

Exam news

This Microsoft Certified Professional (PRO) exam, Exam 70-444: PRO: Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administration Solution by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005, became available in February 2006.

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Audience profile

Candidates for this exam are professional database administrators who optimize and maintain database solutions. They have three or more years dedicated to database work, which may include two or more of the following phases in the product lifecycle: design, development, deployment, optimization, maintenance, or support. The typical work environment is an enterprise or a medium-sized organization. Candidates should be experienced in using Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

Candidates for this exam should be an expert in the following areas:

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Credit toward certification

When you pass Exam 70-444: PRO: Optimizing and Maintaining a Database Administration Solution by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005, you earn credit toward the following certification:

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Preparation tools and resources

To help you prepare for this exam, Microsoft Learning recommends that you have hands-on experience with the product and that you use the following training resources. These training resources do not necessarily cover all of the topics listed in the "Skills measured" section.

Microsoft online resources

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Skills measured

This certification exam measures your ability to optimize and maintain a database administration solution using SQL Server 2005. Before taking the exam, you should be proficient in the job skills listed in the following table. The table shows the official Microsoft Learning products that may help you reach competency in the skills being tested in the exam.

KEY:

= The course provides a general introductory overview of this task. You will need to supplement the course with additional work.     = The course includes some material to prepare you for this task. You will need to supplement the course with additional work.     = The course includes material to prepare you for this task.

Skills measured by Exam 70-444	Course 2787	Course 2789	Course 2790
Optimizing the Performance of Database Servers and Databases
Troubleshoot physical server performance.
Troubleshoot instance performance.
Troubleshoot database performance.
Troubleshoot and maintain query performance. • Identify poorly performing queries. • Analyze a query plan to detect inefficiencies in query logic. • Maintain and optimize indexes. • Enforce appropriate stored procedure logging and output.
Troubleshoot concurrency issues.
Optimizing and Implementing a Data Recovery Plan for a Database
Diagnose causes of failures. Failure types include database failures, physical server failures, and SQL Server service failures.
Plan for fault-tolerance.
Recover from a failure of SQL Server 2005.
Recover from a database disaster. • Plan a strategy. • Restore a database. • Configure logins. • Recover lost data. • Maintain server and database scripts for recoverability.
Salvage good data from a damaged database by using restoration techniques.
Designing a Strategy to Monitor and Maintain a Database Solution
Define and implement monitoring standards for a physical server. • Establish the thresholds for performance. • Establish the baselines for performance. • Define which types of information to monitor on the physical server. • Define traces. • Set alerts. • Set notifications.
Choose the appropriate information to monitor.
Create and implement a maintenance strategy for database servers. • Create a job dependency diagram. • Manage the maintenance of database servers.
Design a database maintenance plan.
Design a strategy to manage Reporting Services.
Designing a Database Data Management Strategy
Design and manage SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages. • Construct complex SSIS packages. • Design security for accessing packages. • Restart failed packages. • Troubleshoot or debug packages. • Deploy and move packages. • Schedule package execution. • Move packages to different servers.
Enforce data quality according to business requirements. • Establish the business requirements for quality. • Create queries to inspect the data. • Use checksum. • Clean the data.
Design data integrity. • Reconcile data conflicts. • Make implicit constraints explicit. • Assign data types to control characteristics of data stored in a column.
Design a strategy to manage data across linked servers. • Set up and manage linked servers.
Design a strategy to manage replication. • Design alerts. • Design a maintenance plan to monitor health, latency, and failures. • Verify replication. • Design a plan to resolve replication conflicts. • Design a plan to modify agent profiles. • Tune replication configuration.
Optimize a database control strategy to meet business requirements. • Verify that database change control procedures are being followed. • Identify all database objects related to a particular deployment.
Designing a Strategy to Manage and Maintain Database Security
Perform a security audit of the existing security infrastructure based on the security plan. • Analyze the physical server security. • Compare the existing security infrastructure to business and regulatory requirements. • Identify variations from the security design.
Maintain a server-level security strategy. • Design a strategy to audit Windows account permissions. • Design a strategy to audit SQL Server service access. • Maintain a strategy to assign the appropriate minimum level of privileges. • Maintain an encryption strategy that meets business requirements. • Design a strategy to apply service packs and security updates. • Configure the surface area.
Maintain a user-level security strategy. • Verify the existence and enforcement of account policies. • Verify SQL Server login authentication. • Verify permissions on SQL Server roles and accounts.
Prepare for respond to threats and attacks. • Prepare for and respond to SQL Server injection attacks. • Prepare for and respond to denial-of-service attacks that are specific to SQL Server. • Prepare for and respond to virus and worm attacks that are specific to SQL Server. • Prepare for and respond to internal attacks that are specific to SQL Server.

Note This preparation guide is subject to change at any time without prior notice and at the sole discretion of Microsoft. Microsoft exams might include adaptive testing technology and simulation items. Microsoft does not identify the format in which exams are presented. Please use this preparation guide to prepare for the exam, regardless of its format.

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