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Case Study 2
Contoso Ltd
Overview
Application Overview
Contoso, Ltd., is the developer of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application.
Contoso is designing a new version of the ERP application. The previous version of the ERP
application used SQL Server 2008 R2. The new version will use SQL Server 2014.
The ERP application relies on an import process to load supplier data. The import process
updates thousands of rows simultaneously, requires exclusive access to the database, and runs daily.
You receive several support calls reporting unexpected behavior in the ERP application.
After analyzing the calls, you conclude that users made changes directly to the tables in the
database.
Tables
The current database schema contains a table named OrderDetails. The OrderDetails
table contains information about the items sold for each purchase order. OrderDetails
stores the product ID, quantities, and discounts applied to each product in a purchase
order. The product price is stored in a table named Products.
The Products table was defined by using the SQL_Latin1_General_CPl_CI_AS collation. A
column named ProductName was created by using the varchar data type.
The database contains a table named Orders. Orders contains all of the purchase orders from
the last 12 months. Purchase orders that are older than 12 months are stored in a table named OrdersOld.
Stored Procedures
The current version of the database contains stored procedures that change two tables. The
following shows the relevant portions of the two stored procedures:
Customer Problems
Installation Issues
The current version of the ERP application requires that several SQL Server logins be set up
to function correctly. Most customers set up the ERP application in multiple locations and
must create logins multiple times.
Index Fragmentation Issues
Customers discover that clustered indexes often are fragmented. To resolve this issue, the
customers defragment the indexes more frequently.
All of the tables affected by fragmentation have the following columns that are used as the
clustered index key:
Backup Issues
Customers who have large amounts of historical purchase order data report that backup time
is unacceptable.
Search Issues
Users report that when they search product names, the search results exclude product names
that contain accents, unless the search string includes the accent.
Missing Data Issues
Customers report that when they make a price change in the Products table, they cannot
retrieve the price that the item was sold for in previous orders.
Query Performance Issues
Customers report that query performance degrades very quickly. Additionally, the customers
report that users cannot run queries when SQL Server runs maintenance tasks.
Import Issues
During the monthly import process, database administrators receive many supports call from
users who report that they cannot access the supplier data. The database administrators want
to reduce the amount of time required to import the data.
Design Requirements
File Storage Requirements
The ERP database stores scanned documents that are larger than 2 MB. These files must only
be accessed through the ERP application. File access must have the best possible read and
write performance.
Data Recovery Requirements
If the import process fails, the database must be returned to its prior state immediately.
Security Requirements
You must provide users with the ability to execute functions within the ERP application,
without having direct access to the underlying tables.
Concurrency Requirements
You must reduce the likelihood of deadlocks occurring when Sales.Proc1 and Sales.Proc2 execute.
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You need to recommend a solution that addresses the backup issue. The solution must
minimize the amount of development effort.
What should you include in the recommendation?
A.
Indexed views
B.
Filegroups
C.
Table partitioning
D.
Indexes
Explanation:
* Backup Issues
Customers who have large amounts of historical purchase order data report that backup
time is unacceptable.
* For very large databases (and by that, I mean, at least 500gb, but more like 5-10tb or
more), it can become too expensive to regularly run a straight full backup . So, where
needed, you can choose to backup smaller pieces of the database by choosing to back up
one of the files or file groups that make up a database.
Option B is right
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“Table partitioning” seems to be the best answer.
Current year , historical orders could be partitioned to separate partition/filegroup; by only backup the filegroup contains current year data without backup all orders is going to reduce backup time.
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Agree with Cray.
Both partition and file group are correct here, however, as there is no mention that the tables are already partitioned then the first coarse of action here would be partitioning the table and then assigning different file groups to each partition and backing up the historical partition file group.This way it would be faster.
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The Overview in the tables area says “purchase … older than 12 months are stored in … OrdersOld”, so if were to create a partitioned table it wouldn’t make sense because they always would have only one partition in use, but if you allocate the tables Orders and OrderDetails in the PRIMARY Filegroup and create a file group named FG_OldOrders to allocate OrdersOld table, you will be able to perform the backup by file group.
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