Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Administration

Chapter 1. SQL Server 2005 Architecture

The days of SQL Server being a departmental database are long gone, and SQL Server can now easily scale to databases dozens of terabytes in size. In this chapter, we lay some of the groundworkthat will be used throughout the book. We first discuss how the role of the DBA has changed since some of the earlier releases of SQL Server and then quickly jump into architecture and tools available to you as an administrator. This chapter is not a deep dive into the architecture but provides enough information to give you an understanding of how SQL Server operates.

Growing Role of a DBA

The role of the database administrator (DBA) has been changing slowly over the past few versions of the SQL Server product. In SQL Server 2005, this slow transition of the DBA role has been accelerated immensely. Traditionally, a DBA would fit into one of two roles: development or administration. It's much tougher to draw a line now between DBA roles in SQL Server 2005. As lines blurand morph, DBAs have to quickly prepare themselves to take on different roles. If you don't position yourself to be more versatile, you may be destined for a career of watching SQL Server alerts and backups.

Production DBA

Production DBAs fall into the traditional role of a DBA. They are a company's insurance policy that the production database won't go down. If the database does go down, the company cashes inits insurance policy in exchangefor a recovered database. The Production DBA also ...