Company Overview
STE is a large express company. STE is an acronym for
Satisfied Transport and Express+-. Therefore, it aims to provide satisfied delivery service for America. This company coordinates package deliveries throughout America. It cooperates with multiple regional delivery companies to distribute packages of all sizes. The company resides in St Louis and its regional delivery partners reside in all parts of America.
Planned Changes
Specifications are being written for a new application to manage employee benefits for STE. This application will authenticate the users to SQL Server by using the Active Directory credentials of users. Some of the benefits data is sensitive and should be viewable only from the benefits management application. However, when users issue ad hoc queries against the benefits data by using Microsoft Access, they are permitted to view other, less sensitive benefits data.
In order to cut down expenditures, the company will consolidate the Promotions database and the Partners database onto a single SQL Server computer. Employees of the regional delivery companies use SQL Server-authenticated logins to access both of these databases. The Partners database is accessible to all users who have access to the Promotions database, but not all users of the Partners database are allowed to access the Promotions database. This SQL Server computer should have as few instances as possible while still meeting these requirements.
Problem Statements
Users report that in the Shipment Tracking application, browser makes slow response, which uses the Tracking database. A large number of global temporary tables are used by the Shipment Tracking application. According to the indication of application diagnostics, performance issues in the database server named SQL01 causes the delays. Results of running the Performance MMC snap-in (PerfMon) reveal high values for the following counters in the tempdb database on SQL01:
Log Flush Wait/sec
Log Growths
The main tables in the Orders database on a server named SQL05 frequently experience heavy data modification and heavy report generation at the same time, causing performance problems for the reports due to excessive blocking.
EXISTING DATA ENVIRONMENT
Database Servers
The table below shows the SQL Server computers that are running SQL Server 2005, are shown in the following table.
Weekly full database backups, nightly differential backups, and hourly log backups for all user databases are included in the existing operations schedule. System databases are backed up every night.
Databases
The Orders application uses a single SQL Server-authenticated login named OrdersApp to connect to SQL05.
The Orders database makes use of data encryption, event notification, DDL triggers, CLR stored procedures, and snapshot isolation. The database master key for the Orders database is encrypted using the service master key for SQL05.
At the time that the server starts, the size of tempdb on SQL01 is 50 MB. But it typically increases to about 1.5 GB, growing 50 MB at a time. At present this database currently has a single data file.
At present all historical customer data are hold by the CRM database from the seven latest completed fiscal years plus the current year to date.
EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE
Network Infrastructure
STE has configured its WAN to allow browser-based extranet access for its regional delivery partners. The diagram below shows the network configuration.
Server Infrastructure
As shown in the following table, the listed protocols are enabled for inbound connections to the servers in the perimeter network.
BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS
General Requirements
Data that is held in the Tracking database must be accessible and can be updated to applications that are run by the regional delivery partners.
With the purpose of research, customer information must be kept in the CRM database for two years. With the purpose of auditing, the company has to keep monthly copies of CRM data for at least five years. This auditing requirement is the only reason the older data must be retained, this is because data older than two years will most likely never be needed. However, if the older data is ever needed, it must be made available, in its entirety, in a database other than CRM so that it can be examined separately from the current data.
Availability
SQL06 has storage area network (SAN) storage, and CRM is supported by SQL06. CRM is an important application that must be available with the least downtime. The ERP application is supported by SQL07. SQL07 must be available with the least downtime.
The company has identified the following availability requirements for SQL06 and SQL07.
Any failover from one SQL Server computer to another should happen automatically.
Each of the servers must be available at an IP address that is the same before and after a failover event.
Performance degradation for the other server cannot be caused by the failure of SQL06 or the failure of SQL07.
Before the initiation of the failover, special data copy operations or other special processing should not be required.
After a failover event, SQL Server Agent jobs must resume running, with no human intervention.
Recoverability
The company must design a process to restore a copy of the Orders database to another SQL Server instance at the end of each month. End-of-month accounting reports will be run by using this copy of the Orders database.
In order to simplify recovery operation, if any type of data loss occur CRM database, no more than five restore operations must be required.
TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS
Security
According to the requirement of the written security policy of the company, credit card information that is stored in the Orders database should be viewable only within the Orders application.
In the ExtraNet and Partners databases, individual users must use SQL Server-authenticated logins to log in to SQL Server. Password expiration must be enforced on all accounts that can access these databases.
According to the requirement of the written security policy of the company, incoming connections to the perimeter network, and all connections from the regional delivery companies, are only allowed over HTTP and HTTPS.
Performance
For performance reasons, applications of the regional delivery companies must be able to use a local copy of the Tracking database to retrieve and update data. This local copy of Tracking database synchronizes back to the central Tracking database.
Interoperability
Some values in the Tracking database must be populated by reading the Windows registry on a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 application server named AppServer1, which resides in St Louis. In order to keep shipment tracking information up-to-date, these values must be populated once per hour.
