NIH/CIT Microsoft SQL Server Database Questionnaire

Organizations and Contacts

What government and contractor organizations are responsible for this project?

Please provide contact information for the following people.

Contact		    Name		Tele#		Pager#		Email Address
Project Leader:
DBA:
Developer:

Application

Please provide a brief description of your application.

Does your application require any products, besides SQL Server, to be installed on the database server?

Will you be migrating an existing application to SQL Server?

Availability

What are your system and application availability requirements?

Does your application require any special business processing cycles, such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually processes that might impact end-user access or database backup schedules?

If your database(s) will require 7/24 support, please provide names and phone numbers of people to contact during off hours.

System Resources

Please specify how many SQL Server instances you require, preferred names for the instances and their purposes (e.g., development, production, training).

How much disk space will you need initially?

How much disk space growth do you anticipate per year?

What are the average and maximum number of concurrent users you anticipate within the first year and in the future?

Backup and Recovery

Please describe the backup methods you require (e.g., full, differential, transaction) for each database and the frequency, day of the week, and time the backups can be performed.

Does your application require recovery to the last backup or to a point in time? If point-in-time, what transaction log backup interval do you require? For example, if transaction log backups are taken every hour, the most data you can lose is one hours worth.

What, if any, is your retention requirement for past backups?

How much downtime can you afford in case of a recovery?

Does your application require disaster recovery? If so, please describe the requirements.

Microsoft-specific features

What SQL Server edition do you require (Standard, Enterprise)?

What SQL Server version do you require (e.g., 2000)?

Do you have any special requirements for character sets and sort orders?

What security configuration do you require (SQL Server and Windows vs. Windows only)?

Hardware

Do you have any special hardware requirements (e.g., RAM, disk storage, RAID configuration, CPU)?

Timeframes

Please specify any timeframes you have for the installation of these databases.

Other

Please specify any concerns, additional facts, or questions you may have.


Last updated 1/6/2004