The Microsoft® Data Warehouse Toolkit: With SQL Server™ 2005 and the Microsoft® Business Intelligence Toolset

3.4. Overview of the Microsoft Tools

Many readers will start to work with SQL Server 2005 by experimenting with its functionality in a single machine sandbox. If you have the time and bandwidth to do so, this is a great way to determine which product features are important to your business and users. In this environment, we recommend that you acquire a true sandbox machine: a new or rebuilt machine with a clean operating system and no other applications. You can use virtual PC technology to simulate a clean machine and run SQL Server well enough to evaluate functionality (although not performance).

Other readers are launching real projects and need to be more rigorous and thoughtful in setting up their environments. As we discuss in Chapter 14, plan from the outset for the standard three-tier system, with separate servers for development, test, and production. Your test system should be as similar to the production system as you can possibly make it. The more different your test and production systems are, the more difficult it is for your database administrators to evaluate alternative approaches to tuning and configuration before rolling those changes into production.

Most teams set up their development environment with a central server or two to hold relational and Analysis Services databases. Developers install the development tools—the studio workbenches described in the next section—on their own machines, and point those tools to the development database server. Early in ...