Deliver advanced functionality faster and cheaper by exploiting SQL Server's ever-growing amount of built-in support for modern data formats. Learn about the growing support within SQL Server for operations and data transformations that have previously required third-party software and all the associated licensing and development costs. Benefit through a better understanding of what can be done inside the database engine with no additional costs or development time invested in outside software. Widely used types such as JSON and XML are well-supported by the database engine. The same is true of hierarchical data and even temporal data. Knowledge of these advanced types is crucial to unleashing the full power that's available from your organization's SQL Server database investment. SQL Server Advanced Data Types explores each of the complex data types supplied within SQL Server. Common usage scenarios for each complex data type are discussed, followed by a detailed discussion on how to work with each data type. Each chapter demystifies the complex data and you learn how to use the data types most efficiently. The book offers a practical guide to working with complex data, using real-world examples to demonstrate how each data type can be leveraged. Performance considerations are also discussed, including the implementation of special indexes such as XML indexes and spatial indexes. What You'll Learn Understand the implementation of basic data types and why using the correct type is so important Work with XML data through the XML data type Construct XML data from relational result sets Store and manipulate JSON data using the JSON data type Model and analyze spatial data for geographic information systems Define hierarchies and query them efficiently through the HierarchyID type Who This Book Is For SQL Server developers and application developers who need to store and access complex data structures

This practical book provides a comprehensive overview of troubleshooting and performance tuning best practices for Microsoft SQL Server. Database engineers, including database developers and administrators, will learn how to identify performance issues, troubleshoot the system in a holistic fashion, and properly prioritize tuning efforts to attain the best system performance possible. Author Dmitri Korotkevitch, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Microsoft Certified Master (MCM), explains the interdependencies between SQL Server database components. You'll learn how to quickly diagnose your system and discover the root cause of any issue. Techniques in this book are compatible with all versions of SQL Server and cover both on-premises and cloud-based SQL Server installations. Discover how performance issues present themselves in SQL Server Learn about SQL Server diagnostic tools, methods, and technologies Perform health checks on SQL Server installations Learn the dependencies between SQL Server components Tune SQL Server to improve performance and reduce bottlenecks Detect poorly optimized queries and inefficiencies in query execution plans Find inefficient indexes and common database design issues Use these techniques with Microsoft Azure SQL databases, Azure SQL Managed Instances, and Amazon RDS for SQL Server

Use this comprehensive guide for the SQL Server DBA, covering all that practicing database administrators need to know to get their daily work done. Updated for SQL Server 2019, this edition includes coverage of new features such as Memory-optimized TempDB Metadata, and Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves. Other new content includes coverage of Query Store, resumable index operations, installation on Linux, and containerized SQL. Pro SQL Server 2019 Administration takes DBAs on a journey that begins with planning their SQL Server deployment and runs through installing and configuring the instance, administering and optimizing database objects, and ensuring that data is secure and highly available. Finally, readers will learn how to perform advanced maintenance and tuning techniques. This book teaches you to make the most of new SQL Server 2019 functionality, including Data Discovery and Classification. The book promotes best-practice installation, shows how to configure for scalability and high workloads, and demonstrates the gamut of database-level maintenance tasks such as index maintenance, database consistency checks, and table optimizations. What You Will LearnInstall and configure SQL Server on Windows through the GUI and with PowerShell Install and configure SQL Server on Linux and in ContainersOptimize tables through in-memory OLTP, table partitioning, and the creation of indexes Secure and encrypt data to protect against embarrassing data breaches Ensure 24x7x365 access through high-availability and disaster recovery features Back up your data to ensure against loss, and recover data when needed Perform routine maintenance tasks such as database consistency checks Troubleshoot and solve performance problems in SQL queries and in the database engine Who This Book Is For SQL Server DBAs who manage on-premise installations of SQL Server. This book is also useful for DBAs who wish to learn advanced features such as Query Store, Extended Events, Distributed Replay, and Policy-Based Management, or those who need to install SQL Server in a variety of environments.

SQL Server 2008 introduces many new features that will change database administration procedures; many DBAs will be forced to migrate to SQL Server 2008. This book teaches you how to develop the skills required to successfully administer a SQL Server 2008 database; no prior experience is required. The material covers system installation and configuration/architecting, implementing and monitoring security controls, configuring and managing network communications, automating administration tasks, disaster prevention and recovery, performance monitoring, optimizing and ensuring high availability, as well as major SQL Server 2008 components including Integration Services, Reporting Services, Analysis Services, and Service Broker.

Protect your data from attack by using SQL Server technologies to implement a defense-in-depth strategy for your database enterprise. This new edition covers threat analysis, common attacks and countermeasures, and provides an introduction to compliance that is useful for meeting regulatory requirements such as the GDPR. The multi-layered approach in this book helps ensure that a single breach does not lead to loss or compromise of confidential, or business sensitive data. Database professionals in today’s world deal increasingly with repeated data attacks against high-profile organizations and sensitive data. It is more important than ever to keep your company’s data secure. Securing SQL Server demonstrates how developers, administrators and architects can all play their part in the protection of their company’s SQL Server enterprise. This book not only provides a comprehensive guide to implementing the security model in SQL Server, including coverage of technologies such as Always Encrypted, Dynamic Data Masking, and Row Level Security, but also looks at common forms of attack against databases, such as SQL Injection and backup theft, with clear, concise examples of how to implement countermeasures against these specific scenarios. Most importantly, this book gives practical advice and engaging examples of how to defend your data, and ultimately your job, against attack and compromise. What You'll LearnPerform threat analysis Implement access level control and data encryption Avoid non-reputability by implementing comprehensive auditing Use security metadata to ensure your security policies are enforced Mitigate the risk of credentials being stolen Put countermeasures in place against common forms of attack Who This Book Is For Database administrators who need to understand and counteract the threat of attacks against their company’s data, and useful for SQL developers and architects

This book, written for readers who have little or no previous experience with databases, SQL, or SQL Server, provides a very systematic approach to learning SQL using SQL Server. Each chapter is written in a step-by-step manner and has examples that can be run using SQL Server. Using the sample tables and data provided, the reader of this book will be able to do all the examples to experience hands-on SQL programming in SQL Server. The book also presents a series of exercises at the end of the chapters to help readers gain proficiency with SQL. With this book you will learn beginning SQL commands - how to retrieve and manipulate data using the simple SELECT statement; how to customize SQL Server 2008’s settings and about SQL Server 2008’s functions; how to create, alter, populate and delete tables; about joins, a common database mechanism for combining tables; query development, the use of views and other derived structures; simple set operations; about aggregate functions; how to write subqueries and correlated subqueries; how to create and use indexes and constraints; transaction processing.

SQL is full of difficulties and traps for the unwary. You can avoid them if you understand relational theory, but only if you know how to put the theory into practice. In this insightful book, author C.J. Date explains relational theory in depth, and demonstrates through numerous examples and exercises how you can apply it directly to your use of SQL. This second edition includes new material on recursive queries, “missing information” without nulls, new update operators, and topics such as aggregate operators, grouping and ungrouping, and view updating. If you have a modest-to-advanced background in SQL, you’ll learn how to deal with a host of common SQL dilemmas. Why is proper column naming so important? Nulls in your database are causing you to get wrong answers. Why? What can you do about it? Is it possible to write an SQL query to find employees who have never been in the same department for more than six months at a time? SQL supports “quantified comparisons,” but they’re better avoided. Why? How do you avoid them? Constraints are crucially important, but most SQL products don’t support them properly. What can you do to resolve this situation? Database theory and practice have evolved since the relational model was developed more than 40 years ago. SQL and Relational Theory draws on decades of research to present the most up-to-date treatment of SQL available. C.J. Date has a stature that is unique within the database industry. A prolific writer well known for the bestselling textbook An Introduction to Database Systems (Addison-Wesley), he has an exceptionally clear style when writing about complex principles and theory.