Prove your credentials with the new MCDBA premium title.

Get Ready for SQL Server 7.0

Prove your credentials with the new MCDBA premium title.

• By Doug Leland
• 03/01/1999

Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 is now a reality and so is the new Microsoft Certified Database Administrator (MCDBA) credential—but should you invest the time and money to upgrade your infrastructure and your credentials?

Thousands of IT professionals worldwide are answering that question with a resounding “yes.” SQL Server 7.0 provides opportunities to address the four hottest application segments of the data marketplace: line-of-business, data warehousing and data marts, e-commerce, and mobile solutions. SQL Server 7.0 can be your ticket to new markets and revenues, and it can provide new ways to address corporate or organizational objectives and enhance business processes. Here’s how:

• Scalability/Reliability—For this release, we’ve made greater gains in performance and reliability than in the last two or three releases combined. For example, SQL Server 7.0’s performance on SAP’s R/3 software is up 100 percent over the previous version. Its performance on PeopleSoft and Baan has climbed even higher—by 1000 percent. Since ERP systems host an organization’s most mission critical solutions, MCPs now can use SQL Server for these most demanding enterprise needs.
• Ease-of-Use—SQL Server 7.0 brings ease-of-use to a new level by eliminating much of the complexity that formerly confronted users. For example, administrators now have the option to choose from task-based menus that correspond to the tasks they actually have to accomplish—such as “adding a user” or “managing a database”—rather than from more traditional, limited, function-driven menus. And 65 Wizards, up from just two in the previous version, speed and simplify tasks. Also, built-in intelligence now automates 80 percent of database administration tasks, from managing disks and storage to configuring maintenance. So administrators can experience unprecedented productivity and MCPs can expand SQL Server use to new markets and new users.
• Integration—Full integration with Office 2000 vastly increases access to information because business users now can work with enterprise corporate data from the same familiar tools and applications they already use to handle their desktop data. That drives information to new levels of the organization and enables new applications.

These new capabilities, and the new solutions and new markets they enable, help to explain why MCPs should seek certification as MCDBAs: both to gain mastery of these new capabilities and to prove that mastery to customers, supervisors, and others. The new credential is a premium-level category equivalent to the Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE), and something that database administrators have been asking us for.

The MCDBA requires four exams focusing on SQL Server and Windows NT Server (because of the tight integration between the two products), plus an elective that supports one or more of the application segments that SQL Server addresses. Given the increasingly mission-critical applications running on SQL Server, companies need to have confidence in the professionals supporting those applications, and the MCDBA credential can help provide that confidence.

To learn more about SQL Server, visit www.microsoft.com/sql. To learn more about the new MCDBA credential, visit www.microsoft.com/
trainingandservices/default.asp?PageID=mcp&SubSite=cert/
mcdba&AnnMenu=mcdba.