Microsoft Certification Ebook

Q:

I am looking for good documentation and examples to use to ’study’ for Microsoft exam 70-431.  This has everything to do with nuts-and-bolts Database Administration of SQL Server 2005.

The December BOL examples, do not cover enough topics.  The topics that are covered are not in enough detail. The 70-431 exam requirements are very detailed.

This seems to be a nuts-and-bolts test.  I am looking for nuts-and-bolts study material.

No books are published yet.

Does anyone have any good ideas on where to find ‘good’ samples and tutorials meant for a person who is studying for the new Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database Administrator Exam MCTS 70-431?

All answers and ideas in ‘any form’ are appreciated.

A:

Since you’re not going to build a cluster with the 70-431 exam content, then you don’t need Virtual Server.  Virtual PC will work just fine.  That’s where I recommend that you do all of your testing.  The primary reason is that it provides an isolated environment for your testing that won’t impact other things.  The second reason is that it becomes a self-contained image.  So, you can build the base environment once, stop Virtual PC, make a copy of the .vhd & .vmc files, and then start everything back up.  If you blow something up or just want to reset everything, all you have to do is shut down the VPC image and copy the .vhd and .vmc files back over.

All of the instructions for setup are done from a VERY conservative standpoint.  I don’t necessarily agree with that particular one, but I got overruled.   The SQL Server setup is going to drop .NET Framework 2.0 on your machine along with the Native Access Client and some setup support files.  It then installs everything else which includes services and some other things.

It obviously isn’t dangerous to do, you just have more software on your machine to contend with and SQL Server is completely stable.   For testing/training environments, we’re always going to recommend finding a machine you can blow up so that you can play as much as you want without having to worry about impacting anything else you are doing.

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