Chapter 21
Playing Administrator
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:
- Running repetitive jobs in off hours
- Setting login and user security
- Understanding the backup and recovery process
- Using maintenance scripts to run backup and recovery
- Using PowerShell to automate administration tasks
And so, here you are. You’ve read about so many aspects of creating a database (and I do hope you’re looking forward to putting that learning into practice), that you probably feel like you’re at the end of the road for now, but there’s one thing left. Someone’s eventually going to have to use that database you’ve developed, so it’s time to talk a bit about maintenance and administration.
As a developer, I can just hear it now: “Isn’t that the database administrator’s job?” If you did indeed say something like that, step back, and smack yourself — hard (and no, I’m not kidding). If there is anything I hope to instill in you in your database development efforts, it’s to avoid the “Hey, I just build ’em, now it’s your problem” attitude that is all too common out there.
A database-driven application is a wildly different animal than most standalone applications. Most standalone applications are either self-maintaining, or deal with single files that are relatively easy for a user to copy somewhere for backup purposes. Likewise, they usually have no “maintenance” issues the way that a database does.
That thing you create, when you put all this to work, broadly falls into what’s called the persistence ...
