Book Review

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Chapter 7: Auditing
You might know that auditing has been part of ASE since version 10 was released. It has since been revised and refined in recent versions, receiving the most significant revision in version 11.5. Even though auditing has changed through the releases, the main purpose of auditing remains the same: to provide accountability. In addition, as you'll know after reading the chapter, auditing can be used to help administer and secure ASE, protect data integrity, and answer many performance questions. In practice, auditing will prove to be a very helpful tool for the productive system administrator.

This chapter on auditing for Sybase ASE 12.5 answers the following questions:

• What is auditing?
• Why use auditing?
• How do I set up auditing?
• What are some tips for successful auditing?
• How do I keep the audit system functioning?
• What can I audit?
• What are the components of the auditing system?

Chapter 8: Backing Up and Restoring
Backing up your databases periodically is perhaps the most mundane task you'll perform, and perhaps the most important. A database backup (dump) is a copy of all the used pages in a database. This is the basic unit of recovery in case of a disaster; when properly verified (via dbcc utilities), we know that all transactions and work within the database are consistent, and that the backup will allow us to return the database to this consistent state. In addition, we'll always back up or restore an entire database. ASE has no mechanism to back up or restore tables, indexes, or individual data components (though there are third-party tools that will do this). It does take some time and energy to create a backup and restore plan, but it's worth the effort.

When a database or hardware starts to fail, it's a great relief to have a disaster recovery plan that you can refer to; when the alarms are still ringing and the boss is looking over your shoulder, you won't need to worry about data loss or re-creating structure. The backups and the plan will return you to working order quickly and efficiently. This chapter answers all the questions that might arise if you are going to build your plan and it will point out things you might not have considered.

Chapter 9: Resource Governor
Some environments are simple. Queries are predefined and predictable. Updates affect few rows. Ad hoc queries aren't permitted. Procedures that use tempdb have limited growth, but not many people get to administer simple environments and for these environments, we have the Resource Governor. The Resource Governor exists to provide the systems administrator with the ability to set limits on precious, limited server resources.

The Resource Governor can limit runaway queries at the application level, login level, or as a combination of the two.

You can limit the following resources:

• I/O costs (estimated or actual)
• Elapsed time
• Number of rows returned
• Amount of space used in tempdb

This chapter provides a detailed description on how to limit and configure these resources.

Chapter 10: Logical Process Manager
Most production environments have sufficient resources for all the users, applications, and queries that are running on the server. Other environments are more limited in available capacity. Some have higher priority applications; some have sets of users with lower priority. Some have mixed uses, where some of the applications have the potential to strangle server resources. This chapter discusses prioritization of work in an SMTP environment, but keep in mind that it is possible to overtune a server, thus restricting its operation when it is able to manage resources on its own. This chapter carefully shows you what is possible and provides general recommendations.

Chapter 11: Configuring and Tuning the Server
As you know, memory is a finite resource. Configuring memory properly can improve the performance of your server. Configuring memory poorly can create a maintenance nightmare, or it can degrade performance by giving precious physical memory to server resources that don't need it, while starving others. You may have seen systems that were running smoothly perform significantly less well after memory reconfiguration by an inexperienced administrator. Here the authors discuss what ASE does with memory, how it's divided, and what control you have over it. In addition, they cover server configuration options that are at least marginally memory-related but don't completely fit within the boundaries of this section.

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