Exam Prep Guide

Ace your preparation for the skills measured by MCTS Exam 70-431—and on the job. Work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully cover each exam objective. Then, reinforce what you?ve learned by applying your knowledge to real-world case scenarios and practices. This official Microsoft study guide is designed to help you make the most of your study time.

Maximize your performance on the exam by learning to:

• Install and configure SQL Server
• Create tables and indexes, define columns, and implement constraints
• Implement functions, stored procedures, and triggers by using Transact-SQL
• Work with relational and XML data
• Monitor, troubleshoot and tune queries
• Maintain database availability with log shipping, database mirroring, and replication
• Prepare a backup strategy and restore a database

Practice Tests

Assess your skills with practice tests on CD. You can work through hundreds of questions using multiple testing modes to meet your specific learning needs. You get detailed explanations for right and wrong answers?including a customized learning path that describes how and where to focus your studies.

Your training kit includes:

• 15% exam discount from Microsoft. Offer expires 12/31/10. Details inside.
• Official self-paced study guide.
• Practice tests with multiple, customizable testing options and a learning plan based on your results.
• 450 practice and review questions.
• Case scenarios, practice exercises, and best practices.
• 180-day evaluation version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition.
• Fully searchable eBook.

A Note Regarding the CD or DVD

The print version of this book ships with a CD or DVD. For those customers purchasing one of the digital formats in which this book is available, we are pleased to offer the CD/DVD content as a free download via O'Reilly Media's Digital Distribution services. To download this content, please visit O'Reilly's web site, search for the title of this book to find its catalog page, and click on the link below the cover image (Examples, Companion Content, or Practice Files). Note that while we provide as much of the media content as we are able via free download, we are sometimes limited by licensing restrictions. Please direct any questions or concerns to booktech@oreilly.com.