May 18, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Ok, I have studied through all the 431 exam material pretty thoroughly but I saved chapter 15 (Profiler, Sys Moniter, DTA, DMV/DMF, etc) for last and when I do the practice test I barely know any answers without memorizing the material after getting them wrong.
I fear that on the test there will be similar but different questions that I will miss because they were not in the practice test. The problem I have is that I do not do any of this in my day to day job as I am actually developing a database, it will be a year or more before I get to performance and diagnosing problems because the database and related applications at my job are still in development, not in production.
Is there any good materials that any of you can point me to, that I can get a thorough enough study for the exam on this stuff? The Microsoft Training Kit book really does not cover the detail that the practice exam goes into on this stuff....
EX) How am I supposed to know that a high value for wait type of DISKIO_SUSPEND means there are external backup sync problems?
This is nowhere in the book, I don't know why this level of detail is on the practice exam.
May 19, 2008 at 5:12 am
What practice exam are you using?
For what it's worth, I didn't see a question that specific on any of the SQL 2005 exams that I've written.
Oh, and just because the app is still in dev doesn't mean you can't do performance testing. You should be doing performance testing as you develop. The production systems's a really bad place to suddenly find you have major performance problems.
Gail Shaw
Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability
May 19, 2008 at 8:41 am
I'm using the practice exam cd that comes with the Microsoft Sql Server Implementation and Maintenance book. I think this is the most common one people use to study with. There are quite a few questions on this chapter on the cd that go into specifics that are not touched on in the book. But I guess its ok if it isn't common to see it on the real exam that much.
Oh, and I will definately do performance testing once we get the apps working enough to do so. It probably will be later this year though.
July 30, 2008 at 10:34 am
I would think that as you are developing the queries that drive your app you would be able to design your indexes very effectively using some of those features. Don't wait until you have a complete application before you test each individual stored proc or index.
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