Scalable Microsoft SQL Server Management

SQL Enterprise Manager is a breakthrough in managing database servers. It gives administrators a visual way to manage and operate many SQL systems from a single console.

The graphical interface has several built-in wizards to help set up and automate standard tasks. The key features of SQL Enterprise Manager are:

A fully graphical administration interface to control and monitor the operation of many Microsoft SQL Servers and the clients accessing them.
A job scheduler that runs periodic administrative tasks such as dumps, reorganizations, and integrity checks.
A Distributed Management Objects (DMO) mechanism that allows administrators to automate exception handling and to automate tasks by writing Visual Basic® scripts or by letting a wizard write the script. These procedures can use e-mail and a TAPI-based beeper system to report results or notify operators when their attention is needed.
An extension mechanism that allows third parties to add new administrative tools.
A fully graphical interface to configure and manage database replication.

SQL Enterprise Manager includes the Database Maintenance Wizard to set up routine maintenance operations and the Web Assistant to routinely publish Web pages from the database to an Internet or intranet.

Utilities to load, dump, recover, check, and reorganize large databases are key to operating a system with huge databases. Backing up a 100 GB database using a single high-performance tape drive will take over 33 hours. By using multiple disks and tapes in parallel, Microsoft SQL Server and Windows NT Server have shown a sustained dump rate of 20 GB per hour. This benchmark was I/O-limited; with more tapes and disks, the dump rate could have been even faster. Management of the dumps can be controlled by the SQL Enterprise Manager job scheduler working with commodity tape robots. These dumps can either be done at full-speed or in the background at a slower rate. By doing incremental dumps and by increasing the degree of parallelism, huge databases can be dumped in a few hours.