Study Guide for Certification Exam 70-433

Partition Tables : Yes this is one of the hot topics of MS SQL Server 2008. You should work with a sample table and an archive table of that table. Than try moving some of the data from main table to the archive table. Believe me, you will have to do this in your production environment many times. It is easy with partitioned tables and Switch, Merge and Split commands on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 databases now.

Identify Deadlocks using SQL Profiler: Try to catch the context of a deadlock problem in a SQL 2008 database. I feel locky myself since I had done it before. I can recommend you the article at http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/how-to-track-down-deadlocks-using-sql-server-2005-profiler/ for tracking deadlocks in SQL Server Profiler tool.

New SQL data types : Do you know the new sql data types introduced with the MS SQL Server 2008 version. I can recommand you to work on new data types in detail, new sql date and time data types, as well ass the new spatial data types. I had such questions on beta exams of SQL Server 2008 certification exams more than once.

Execution Plans and query statistics : Do you ever use the SHOWPLAN command to see how the SQL Server engine is running your query. You can optimize your sql queries if you work on the execution plans and reach better performance from yout queries as a sql developer. Also you can measure your queries performance comparing the IO statistics of each different execution of different queries by using the SET STATISTICS IO t-sql command. Work on SET STATISTICS IO, SET SHOWPLAN_ALL, etc t-sql commands that will help you gather sql performance data from query analyzer.