MCDBA SQL Server 7 Test Yourself Practice Exams (Exams 70-028 & 70-029) [Paperback]

Syngress Media Inc (Author), Brian Wells (Illustrator), Beth Young (Illustrator)

Book Description

Series: Certification Press Study Guides | Publication Date: December 3, 1999

-- This Test Yourself Practice Exams includes:
-- Full coverage of both SQL Server 7 Database Administration and SQL Server 7 Database Design official exam objectives (exam 70-28 & 70-29).
-- More than 800 sample exam questions with in-depth answers.
-- Exam Watch warnings point out troublesome exam questions and issues and shows readers how to be prepared.
-- Special "How to Take an MCDBA Exam" section.
-- New and Expanded Test Yourself format. Within each topical chapter, questions and answer sets will now be identified by official exam objective, and a Quick-Review instructional text will be included for each section so candidates can review AND practice.
-- Improved Answers. These books are taking a new approach to the questions and answers. While still offering as much detailed information for the correct answer, the answers are now expanded to show why the incorrect choices are wrong. This not only shows how to do things, but also how not do things and why.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Test yourself--don't let the real test be your first test! More questions - more content: the best self-testing program available. Based on Microsoft's MCDBA SQL Server 7 Database Design and Database Administration exams. Covers all Microsoft-defined exam objectives for Exams 70-028 and 70-029. Comprehensive coverage features more than 700 practice exam questions-grouped by official exam objective; answers provide in-depth explanations - and show why the incorrect choices are wrong, as shown below: You have found that performance is degrading on a stored procedure that builds product summaries from your order detail records. You have run the SQL Server Query Analyzer and noticed that a composite index is no longer being used. Warnings about out of date or missing statistics are not appearing on the graphical execution plan. What should you do to give the query optimizer better information about the composite index? A: Run the Index Tuning Wizard. B: Run CREATE STATISTICS for all columns in the composite index. C: Run UPDATE STATISTICS. D: Drop the index and re-create it. Correct: B: Statistics are automatically created for only the first column of a composite index. The query optimizer may be seeing that the cost of using the composite index may be too high given the distribution of values in the first column. Adding statistics for the other columns in the composite index will allow the query optimizer to more accurately determine whether the index should be used to process the query. Incorrect: A: is incorrect because the Index Tuning Wizard will not create new statistics. C is incorrect because statistics are up-to-date. Running UPDATE STATISTICS is unlikely to change the query optimizer's strategy based on the distribution of data in the first column of the composite index. D is wrong because re-creating the index will just update the statistics for the first column.

About the Author

Syngress Media, Inc. (Norwell, MA) is an independent company committed to creating the very best book, software and Internet based exam preparation tools. They have published over 20 certification study guides and over a dozen Personal Testing Centers. All of these products are created by leading content experts, many of whom are also full-time trainers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Osborne Publishing (December 3, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0072121815
• ISBN-13: 978-0072121810
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,870,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely recommendable, April 7, 2000

By 

Mark Seemann (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Test Yourself Practice Exams (Exams 70-028 & 70-029) (Paperback)

This book I bought as part of the MCDBA boxed set from Syngress, and it's the only one of the batch that's really worth your money.

The questions in the book are very hard, and although the format is a bit different than in the real test, it's my personal opinion that these are harder than on the real test.

Each question has elaborate answers telling you both why the correct answer is correct, and why the incorrect answers are incorrect. Here, I learned much about SQL Server that I didn't know before, so with this book, you not only test your knowledge; you also learn while you do it.

More than one author has contributed to this book, and it's my impression that the section(s) on the design test are more thoroughly worked out than the ones on the administration test.

My only real gripe with this book is that some questions (most in the administration section) seem to have erronous answers, but it's not many.

This book will not teach you SQL Server, but if you know the product already, this book can help you prepare for the test(s).

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful if you understand its limits, August 1, 2000

By 

Matthew Wills (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Test Yourself Practice Exams (Exams 70-028 & 70-029) (Paperback)

The key to books like this one is understanding their limitations. The book does not claim to teach everything to pass the two exams it covers - it is simply a collection of practice questions and exams. And, to this end, it is a great book.

For those with a strong understanding of the material (designing and implementing databases in SQL Server 7, and administering SQL Server 7), the book is excellent in giving you a feel for the topics to be covered in the final exam. It certainly helps you highlight areas of weakness which you need to address.

In many ways, I like the style of the book, in that it does not really assist those trying to become paper MCDBAs (ie. with the certification, but without any practical knowledge), since it has a certain level of assumed knowledge.

There are (in my opinion) some errors, but they seemed to be few and far between. Overall, a fine resource.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, January 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: MCDBA SQL Server 7 Test Yourself Practice Exams (Exams 70-028 & 70-029) (Paperback)

I thought that this books was wonderful, between this book and the transcenders I fell very prepared for these tests. However, I not only feel better prepared for the tests I genuinely learned a lot about SQL Server 7 that I did not know, especially about optimizing the database with indexes.