asked
Microsoft products
Can you share your experience in Microsoft Dynamics (CRM) and BizTak SQL Servers and DBA responsibilities? It is now in development and operated by the vendor. I wonder what to expect and what would be a good HA solution (we have cluster) with no data loss. Please let me know. Thank you.
What access to the CRM will you have? In my old job we got given a CRM but weren't allowed any access to the backend whatsoever as it was serviced by a third party organisation.
That should be OK then, it was an absolute nightmare when we had no access.
With BizTalk the DBA has very few responsibilities. Make sure you have very good backups in place because point in time recovery is a must with BizTalk. Perform consistency checks and do your backups. That's about it. With Dynamics CRM, you have more to do, but still not as much as with a home-grown app. It's much more a 3rd party app. You will need to set up backups, etc. But you will also need to come up with a mechanism for tuning queries. No, you can't tune the queries, but you can add indexes. But knowing where and when to add indexes is hard. I'd suggest taking a look at [my query][1] that allows you to search the procedure cache for missing indexes. I used it successfully to help tune a CRM implementation. Just know that it can be somewhat expensive so I would not recommend it running when the server is under stress. Other than that, it's a database. Monitor performance, watch for issues, configure backups, test restores, etc., etc. [1]:
http://www.scarydba.com/2009/03/02/more-refinements-on-the-missing-indexes-query/
This is exciting. Thank you very much for your response!!! We are planning to set up the backup as full backup per a day and differential every 6hrs and transaction log every 15 min. However, they don’t want to lose 15min of data. What is the best solution?
Spend lots of money. You can set up clusters for these products. You can also set up mirroring. You can even get into the low level stuff and provide SAN level snapshots. Remember, they're all just databases, like anything else. You might want to consider taking log backups of biztalk more frequently and skipping the differentials. It really depends on the system.
Identify the requirements and get it in writing... then determine what it would take to support those decisions. If 15 minutes is too much you may want to look at a combo of solutions (see Grant's list for starters).
