Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Administration

Chapter 4. Managing and Troubleshooting the Database Engine

With the server now installed or upgraded, the first thing you need to do is configure it for your environment. In this chapter, we discuss how to configure your SQL Server instance. After configuring the instance, we show you how to manage the instance with Management Studio and a number of stored procedures or DMVs. The chapter also covers how to monitor connections on your SQL Server and how to troubleshoot problems.

This chapter assumes you already know the basics of Management Studio navigation and focuses on what you'll need to know as a DBA. Many other chapters in this book spend much of their time driving into certain areas of Management Studio, and those points have been left out of this chapter (backing up your database, for example, is covered in Chapter 18).

Configuration Tools

Now that you have SQL Server installed, or have upgraded to SQL Server 2005, it will probably not be configured specifically for you out of the box. In SQL Server 2005, Microsoft has chosen to reduce the feature set of SQL Server dramatically out of the box by turning off features after installation. The features turned off may vary based on the edition of SQL Server. For example, TCP/IP is disabled in Developer edition by default, and every edition has CLR integration turned off. This makes the environment more usable for you as an administrator by not having features you don't care about crowding your administration screen. It also reduces ...