Presented by SQL Server Certified Masters Argenis Fernandez and Robert Davis:

Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices

There are many reasons why we follow best practices and these reasons change over the course of a career. Early in our careers, we followed best practices because people who claimed to know more about SQL Server told us to, and we assumed that their advice was better than our own.

This of course led to us adopting the best practice of not following the advice of someone simply because they claimed to know more than others. It’s not always easy to know who you can trust for best practices. At some point in our careers, we came to the realization that for most reported best practices we could find posted on the internet, with just a little more research, we could find the exact opposite advice posted as a best practice on another website or blog. In addition to figuring out who to trust for best practices, we started developing the skill of evaluating the best practices ourselves to determine if what they were saying agreed with what we could prove. In short, we learned the value of testing before implementing.

At some point, we started cultivating our own set of best practices. Ultimately, it’s a culmination of what we have learned, our own experiences, our own tests, and our understanding of how SQL operates internally.

Being able to develop and evaluate best practices is a critical skill for DBAs. That’s one reason that two SQL Server Certified Masters (MCMs) Argenis Fernandez (blog|@DBArgenis) and Robert L Davis (blog|@SQLSoldier) with more than 25 years of collective experience are offering this pre-con Demystifying Database Administration Best Practices. This training will cover more than simply enumerating best practices. We will show you why they are best practices and show you how to evaluate best practices for yourself.

This training will touch on all aspects of the DBA realm from Active Directory configuration to Windows Server deployments to SQL installs bundled with a configuration settings galore. We will cover the "why's" behind the best practices, tips and tricks to make your daily duties as a DBA easier, and what to look for while performing code reviews.

Bring your DBA skills to the next level!

Here are some of the topics we'll cover:

• Active Directory configuration for SQL Server Deployments
• Windows Server Deployments
• Storage and I/O
• High Availability / Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
• Replication
• Day-To-Day Operations
• Maintenance
• TempDB
• Code Reviews
• Other Database and Server Settings