Although SSMS is the most frequently used of the
tools supplied in a standard install, there are other tools that you
should be aware of. In this section, we’ll talk about other tools
available from the Start menu. These are largely
GUI-based tools. Then, in the next major section, we’ll talk about
command-line tools that you access via the Windows command prompt.
In this section, you will learn about some of the
additional tools that are available when you install other components
like Analysis Services and Reporting Services. If you want to experiment
with these features, simply run the SQL Server Installation Center
application under the Configuration Tools Start menu. This will launch
the Installation Center, and from there, you can click the Installation
panel and click the “add features to an existing installation” link.
This will launch a wizard that allows you to add the rest of the tools
to your recent SQL Server installation.
The Microsoft SQL Server 2010 folder is where the bulk of the tools available to SQL Server users reside. Figure 1 shows the SQL Server 2012 folder within the Start menu.
Figure 1. SQL Server 2012 Start menu
It may be a surprise to some folks to see Visual
Studio 2010 installed when you install SQL Server 2012. This is because
some of the business intelligence tools such as Analysis Services,
Integration Services, and Reporting Services leverage the Visual Studio
shell, and thus, you also have Visual Studio 2010 installed. Don’t get
too excited, though; it’s just the shell and doesn’t contain any
programming languages like Visual C#.
1. Analysis Services Folder
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is
Microsoft’s business intelligence workhorse. It enables users to easily
perform online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis, develop key
performance indicator (KPI) scorecards, and perform data mining on
existing data. OLAP has traditionally been a specialty skill among DBAs.
However, with SQL Server providing rich out-of-the-box analytical
functionality, companies are taking advantage and requiring their
otherwise relational DBA to be more involved in OLAP and data
warehousing.
In the Analysis Services folder, you find a
single application called Deployment Wizard. This tool takes projects
made with the SQL Server Data Tools and deploys them to the specified
server.
2. Configuration Tools Folder
The Configuration Tools folder contains the
following four applications: SQL Server Installation Center, SQL Server
Error and Usage Reporting, Reporting Services Configuration Manager, and
SQL Server Configuration Manager.
SQL Server Installation Center
The SQL Server Installation Center is the same application you saw when you initially launched setup.exe . This link just makes finding this application more convenient, so you’re not spending time digging around the file system.
SQL Server Error and Usage Reporting
Have you ever wondered why Microsoft is so
persistent at asking its customers whether error reports and usage
information can be sent to Microsoft for analysis? Some may think it’s
an attempt to obtain information with an eye toward spying on customers,
but in reality, this is far from the truth. The dumps that are sent out
do not contain user data and are used essentially to fix bugs within
the product. You can probably guess that if Microsoft sees thousands of
the same kind of error dumps, it might realize that it has an issue with
something. The usage reporting piece of this also does not send any
customer-sensitive data; rather, it simply provides answers to questions
such as, “How many times did you access a certain dialog box?” or “How
many tables do you have in each database?” This usage information helps
SQL Server product development in a number of ways. For example, if the
trend for customers is to have a really large number of tables, SQL
Server Management Tools should provide features that make managing
numerous tables within a database easier. The SQL Error and Usage
Reporting application within the Configuration Tools folder allows you
to specify whether you want to store and send error and usage
information to Microsoft. Figure 2 shows this application.
Note Figure 2 is shown with the options expanded.
Figure 2. Error and Usage Report Settings dialog box
The Error and Usage Report Settings dialog box
also allows for the selection of specific components within SQL Server.
If you were curious about what data is collected, you can read these
reports right from the file path specified in the Error Reports Location
column. This valuable information is available once you click the
Options button.
Reporting Services Configuration Manager
The Reporting Services Configuration Manager is
also available from the Configuration Tools folder. This tool is used to
manage the configuration of Reporting Services and is shown in Figure 3.
Note When you launch the Reporting Services Configuration Manager application, you will be asked to connect to a server instance.
Figure 3. Reporting Services Configuration Manager
Reporting Services originally shipped as an
add-on to SQL Server 2000. Since then, it has undergone a plethora of
changes and improvements and has now become an enterprise reporting
platform. The Reporting Services Configuration Manager shown in Figure 3
allows administrators to define or change the setting of Reporting
Services components. This tool is not responsible for managing specific
reports; rather, it’s focused on the general configuration of Reporting
Services.
SQL Server Configuration Manager
The SQL Server Configuration Manager is an
important tool to become familiar with if you are a DBA. This tool is a
Microsoft management console (MMC) snap-in and allows you to manage
three important aspects of SQL Server. First, it allows you to manage
all the services that are related to SQL Server. Figure 4 shows the SQL Server Services node of SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Figure 4. SQL Server Services node in SQL Server Configuration Manager
Managing the services from this snap-in instead
of the Services control applet in Windows is a very important habit to
start. The main reason for this has to do with the actions required to
change the service account. Simply changing the username for the
service, which is what the Windows Services applet in Control Panel
does, is not enough. SQL Server has various folders and registry keys
that need to have their access control lists (ACLs) updated upon this
new change. If you decide not to listen to us and insist on changing the
service account using the Windows Services applet, depending on the
rights of the new account used, your service may simply fail to start
because of a lack of permissions on either the file system or the
registry. Thus, make your life simple, and use the SQL Server
Configuration Manager only to manage services related to SQL Server.
The Services node does provide a lot more
features other than simple service account management. If you wanted to
enable the Filestream feature, you could do so through the Properties
dialog box of the SQL Server service. Another important feature within
the Properties dialog box of the SQL Server service itself is that of
startup parameters. To view or modify these for the SQL Server service,
click the Startup Parameters tab. In some rare occasions, if you had to
start SQL Server in single-user mode or start SQL Server with a special
trace flag, you would do this by passing a startup parameter.
The next significant behavior of SQL Server you
can manage from this tool is network configuration. The question this
node is going to answer is, “Which protocols will you allow SQL Server
to allow connections from?” Figure 5 shows the Protocols node.
Figure 5. Protocols node in SQL Server Configuration Manager
Since you installed the evaluation edition, the
only protocol that is enabled is Shared Memory. This is also the default
behavior for new installations of Developer and Express editions of SQL
Server. Shared Memory can make connections only when the client is
physically on the same machine as the user. Thus, if you had tried and
failed to remotely connect to this server (perhaps through another
client machine), having only Shared Memory enabled is probably the
reason. If you want to connect from a remote machine, you should use any
of the other protocols. The most common one used to communicate with
SQL Server is TCP/IP.
If you want to encrypt the flow of traffic to
and from SQL Server, the Properties dialog box of the Protocols node
allows you to force all traffic coming to and from SQL Server to be
encrypted.
The discussion up until now involves the
scenario where clients make connections to SQL Server. SQL Server can
also be a client. Figure 6 shows the Client Protocols node.
Figure 6. The Client Protocols node within SQL Server Configuration Manager
In this default behavior,
all three protocols are enabled. In addition, a column called Order
describes the order of priority of protocols. An order of 1 means that
the protocol should be used first to establish a connection.
Each one of these protocols has a different
purpose. For example, to communicate on the Internet, you use TCP/IP.
TCP/IP is the most frequently used protocol, because most LANs are set
up to use it. Shared Memory is special, because it works only within the
same server. Thus, you cannot make a remote machine connection using
Shared Memory.
Documentation and Community Folder
The Documentation and Community folder contains
useful resources for learning more about SQL Server. This folder
contains a hyperlink to the SQL Server 2012 resource center, which is a
web site containing a variety of information on SQL Server such as
forums and other discussion groups. The folder also contains Community
Project and Samples and SQL Server Documentation. Note that this folder
and its components are installed when you select the Documentation
Components feature option in setup. If you did not do this when
installing SQL Server, you can simply rerun the setup and install just
the documentation components.
Community Projects and Samples
The CodePlex web page contains SQL Server code
samples and sample databases. All samples are available as downloads
through the CodePlex web site at www.codeplex.com.
CodePlex is Microsoft’s effort at an open source developer community.
You can download not only SQL code but also code from a variety of other
products and projects uploaded by users just like yourself.
Integration Services Folder
SQL Server’s Integration Services is Microsoft’s
extract, transform, and load (ETL) platform for SQL Server. A data
warehouse consists of data that comes from multiple sources and multiple
formats. An ETL tool is used to extract this information from all these
different sources, transform it into a common format (if necessary),
and load it into the data warehouse. As we mentioned, SQL Server’s
version of an ETL tool is called SQL Server
Integration Services. The capabilities that this tool exposes yield use
cases that are far beyond the simple ETL operation of a data warehouse.
SSIS is so extensible that features like maintenance plans within SQL
Server Management Studio leverage the powerful workflow designer. Most
of the functionality, including the ability to create SSIS packages, is
contained within the SQL Server Data Tool.
Data Profiler Viewer
The Data Profiler task in SSIS allows you to
quickly assess key statistics about data in a database table. Statistics
include data points such as column value and length distribution,
column null ratio, column patterns, and functional dependencies. Since
SSIS has no native way to view the output of the Data Profiler task, the
Data Profiler Viewer tool can be used in this scenario.
Execute Package Utility
This utility provides you with a graphical way
to execute a package. When you run an SSIS package, a lot of options are
available such as where to load the package from, where to write log
files to, and so on. All of these options can be specified on the
command line as well, but this tool makes doing so easier.
Project Conversion Wizard
A lot of improvements and changes were made to
how SSIS packages can be deployed in SQL Server 2012. This wizard
generates a project development file, which is a compiled project
consisting of packages and parameters. This project development file can
then easily be used to deploy your SSIS project to an Integration
Services catalog.
Performance Tools Folder
Performance is one of the most common questions
and investigations fielded by database administrators. SQL Server 2008
comes with two GUI-based tools out of the box: Database Engine Tuning
Advisor and SQL Server Profiler.
Database Engine Tuning Advisor
Database performance is affected by a variety of
factors. One of the initial investigations when troubleshooting
performance is to analyze the execution plan of the query. The execution
plan tells you things such as which indexes were used, if any were used
at all. The Database Engine Tuning Advisor will analyze a workload
against a given database and suggest ways to improve the performance.
More commonly, it will suggest indexes where they do not currently
exist. It will even provide the script to use, so all you have to do is
click the button to use the new index.
SQL Server Profiler
One of the event engines within SQL Server
Profiler is called SQL Trace. SQL Trace is primarily used for
performance tuning and optimization efforts. With SQL Trace, you could
set up the trace to collect every T-SQL statement executed. With these
data collected, you could analyze and view the results to see things
such as how long the query took and under what security context it was
running.
Import and Export Data Wizard
The Import and Export Data Wizard makes moving
data from a source to a destination easy. The wizard will not move any
objects over as part of the deployment. To move objects, you need to use
another tool like the Copy Database Wizard. The end product of this
wizard is a functional SSIS package that will import or export data.
This package can be used as a great starting point for you to modify and
work it into your own requirements.
SQL Server Data Tools
SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is the main
development environment used by SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server
Integration Services, and SQL Server Reporting Services. In earlier
versions, this tool was called the Business Intelligence Development
Studio (BIDS). Microsoft changed the name most likely due to the
inclusion of additional relational database development capabilities.
With SSDT, you can also create database projects that can be deployed
on-premise against a SQL Server relational database engine or in the
cloud via SQL Azure.
The look and feel of SSDT is similar to SQL
Server Management Studio. These products all leverage the Visual Studio
shell, so if you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed, these
products just show up. If you do not have Visual Studio 2010, a
lightweight version of Visual Studio is installed for you when you
install SSDT. That is why you see a Visual Studio 2010 menu item when
you install the SQL Server Data Tools.
