Specifications

C H A P T E R 3

Data-Tier Applications

sk application developers or database administrators what it was like to work with

data-driven applications in the past, and most probably do not use adjectives such

as “easy,” “enjoyable,” or “wonderful” when they describe their experience. Indeed, the

development, deployment, and even the management of data-driven applications in the

past were a struggle. This was partly because Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Visual

Studio were not really outtted to handle the development of data-driven applica-

tions, the ability to create deployment policies did not exist, and application developers

couldn’t effortlessly hand off a single package to database administrators for deploy-

ment. After a data-driven application was deployed, developers and administrations

found making changes to be a tedious process. Much later in the life cycle of data-driven

applications, they came to the stark realization that there was no tool available to cen-

trally manage a deployed environment. Obviously, many challenges existed throughout

the life cycle of a data-driven application.

Introduction to Data-Tier Applications

With the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, the SQL Server Manageability team

addressed these struggles by introducing support for data-tier applications to help

streamline the deployment, management, and upgrade of database applications. A data-

tier application, also referred to as a DAC, is a single unit of deployment that contains all

the elements used by an application, such as the database application schema, instance-

level objects, associated database objects, les and scripts, and even a manifest dening

the organization’s deployment requirements.

The DAC improves collaboration between data-tier developers and database adminis-

trators throughout the application life cycle and allows organizations to develop, deploy,

and manage data-tier applications in a much more efcient and effective manner than

ever before, mainly because the DAC le functions as a single unit. Database administra-

tors can now also centrally manage, monitor, deploy, and upgrade data-tier applications

with SQL Server Management Studio and view DAC resource utilization across the SQL

Server infrastructure in Utility Explorer at scale.