Introduction
Maintenance
SQL Agent Jobs
Server & Policy Management
Recovery & Backup
Azure Automation Service
Elastic Jobs
Automated Tuning
Automated Patching
Summary
The course is part of this learning path
Whether you’re running SQL Server on-premise, in a VM, on a managed instance, or using Azure SQL, there is maintenance to be performed and other tasks that need to be executed on a regular basis. In this course, we will look at the options available to you in these various environments for automating maintenance and regularly repeated tasks.
SQL Server has a long history of task automation through SQL Server agent, not only will we see how to use it but also how it’s been adapted to carry out maintenance tasks, and how similar functionality has made it into Azure services. From mundane single-database scheduled backups through to task and performance automation across multiple servers, this course looks at on-premise and in-cloud options.
If you have any feedback relating to this course, feel free to contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Maintain your databases and data through the use of maintenance plans and the SQL Server Maintenance Wizard
- Use SQL Agent Jobs to automate maintenance tasks
- Automate maintenance across multiple SQL servers
- Set up rules to enforce policies
- Back up your SQL Server instances using Azure Recovery Services Vault
- Learn about the Azure Automation Service and how it can be used
- Use Elastic Jobs to schedule tasks within the context of databases
- Manage database performance with Automated Tuning
- Manage database updates with Automated Patching
Intended Audience
- Data engineers
- Database engineers
- IT professionals or anyone looking to learn about automating tasks in Azure SQL and SQL server
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have experience with SQL Server Management Studio, be familiar with reading and writing SQL, and have an understanding of basic database architecture and administration tasks, like indexes and backups.
Course Related SQL Scripts
https://github.com/cloudacademy/azure-sql-task-automation-dp-300
I now want to talk about the maintenance plan feature found on SQL Server that will help you automate common maintenance tasks either on-premise or on a virtual machine. These features allow you to perform a variety of tasks at scheduled intervals on selected databases. Those tasks include check database integrity, shrink a database, reorganize, and rebuilt indexes, updates statistics, clean up history, execute SQL server agent jobs, which we shall look at a little later on, back up a database, and clean up a maintenance task.
Before we get started with the maintenance plan wizard, there's a couple of things we need to check to make sure that our scheduled tasks will work. Firstly, we must enable agent XPS with the SP configure command so that we can work with extended procedures with an SQL server management studio. Value of one will enable a feature or option or a value of zero will disable it. We must also make sure that our SQL agent service is running and preferably set to automatic start-up so that any maintenance plans or jobs that we will schedule in the future will actually run.
Hallam is a software architect with over 20 years experience across a wide range of industries. He began his software career as a Delphi/Interbase disciple but changed his allegiance to Microsoft with its deep and broad ecosystem. While Hallam has designed and crafted custom software utilizing web, mobile and desktop technologies, good quality reliable data is the key to a successful solution. The challenge of quickly turning data into useful information for digestion by humans and machines has led Hallam to specialize in database design and process automation. Showing customers how leverage new technology to change and improve their business processes is one of the key drivers keeping Hallam coming back to the keyboard.