About the Training Kit (Exam 70-462): Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases Your 2-in-1 Self-Paced Training Kit Exam Prep Guide Ace your preparation for the skills measured by Exam 70-462?and on the job. Work at your own pace through a series of lessons and reviews that fully covers each exam objective. Then, reinforce and apply what youve learned through real-world case scenarios and practice exercises. This official Microsoft study guide is designed to help make the most of your study time. Maximize your performance on the exam by learning Install and configure SQL Server 2012 and related services Manage databases and Database Engine, Analysis Services, Reporting Services Implement and troubleshoot security settings, permissions, logins, and roles Manage, migrate, back up, and restore data Implement high AlwaysOn, clusters mirroring, replication Monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize SQL Server 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.
I thought I was harsh when reviewing the 70-461 Training Kit, but compared to this piece of garbage, 70-461 was the Tome of Enlightenment itself. The job of a training kit of this kind is three-fold: to help you review the material you already know, to refresh the material you know but don't use much, and to explain the material you neither use nor are familiar with. This book fails spectacularly on all three accounts. It basically is a chain of chapters containing nothing but instructions on what needs to be clicked to accomplish a certain task. It does not explain what the task is for. It does not give any background. It does not shed any light on any points which may be unclear. It goes literally like this; "open this window, click this button, go to the next step, repeat", with an occasional random screenshot thrown in. Whenever a deeper explanation is required, the book simply provides a note with a link to Microsoft website, and if you are going to use that for study, then, frankly, paying for the whole book is totally redundant. It may be somewhat useful as a list of topics you'll need to know, and it can serve as a decent paperweight (if you get the physical book0, but it's most definitely overpriced for these two purposes. Stay away. It's that awful.
This book covers most of the content necessary to administer SQL Server 2012 databases.
It reads just like a well-refined version of Books Online, and while some may consider that a bad thing, the book is straight without wasting any time. I found the practice exercises particularly helpful in understanding the major concepts (that is, of course, if you manage to set up the practice environment with 6 virtual machines), and that's the one thing that gives this book an advantage over Books Online.
If you're looking to know the basics fast then this is a great book, I recommend it, but if you really want to be an expert at administering databases, further reading is definitely necessary.
I am preparing for exam 70-458 which covers not only everything of exam 70-463 but also the second part of this book. If you want to know about high availability and alwayson groups, security, all kind of indexing and performance and backup and restore, this book has good practical exercises. I hope this will get me through the exam and if not, I'll probably reread it just as long till I get it.