The Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions
provide planning and architecture guidance for various mission-critical workloads deployed by users. These guides
reflect the knowledge gained by the CAT team while working with customers on
mission-critical deployments, many of these deployments being the result of
deep customer engagements by the CAT organization. Each guide provides not only
the key technical concepts and information helpful for design, but also
“lessons learned,” best practices, and references to customer case studies. 

The Technical Reference Guides for Designing Mission-Critical Solutions cover three workloads:

  • Online Transactional Processing (OLTP)
    These guides cover transactional and batch processing, relational and “beyond relational” data, scale-up and scale-out,
    data center optimization, compliance, high availability and disaster recovery,
    and data access.
  • Data Warehousing (DW)
    These guides cover massively parallel processing (PDW), symmetric multi-processing (SMP), reference and custom architectures, data
    sources, ETL, warehouse consumers, data center optimization, compliance, and
    high availability and disaster recovery.
  • Middleware
    These guides cover messaging, workflow, distributed caching, web services, complex
    event processing, enterprise integration patterns, high availability and disaster recovery, and operations.  

These technical reference guides are useful after one has made the conceptual architectural decisions to address
specific business needs and is ready to work through the technical design alternatives to choose a solution. 

You can access these guides through their home page at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/hh273157 

Applies to: SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2