Welcome to the March newsletter from Australia's leading SQL Server Consultants, Trainers and Business Intelligence specialists

Almost a day doesn't go by when there isn't another article about an organisation being unable to recover their data in a timely manner. Recently in Australia there have been a number of high profile examples of this including a Bank and an Airline not to mention a number of natural disasters. Not only do these incidents have a direct cost on an organisation, there is also an indirect cost associated with the damage to the organisations reputation. WARDY IT Solutions offers a number of services to ensure that your organisation is not on the front page of the paper due to people being unable to access their money or board their planes. To find out more about our SQL Server risk assessment contact us today here.

Happy Reading

Peter Ward

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Microsoft Platform Power Briefings

The Microsoft Platform is a comprehensive and integrated set of tools and technologies which provide capabilities that help you maximize value from your application portfolio and business processes. The Microsoft Power Briefing sessions are an opportunity to learn more about the solutions that work together to provide you with a consistent experience from configuring your infrastructure to building applications. To register for these Power Briefing refer to here.

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SQL Server 2005 End of Life

One area where there is often a lot of confusion is the Microsoft product support lifecycle. There is a common misconception that a product is supported for 12 months from the release of the last Service Pack. However, this is not always the case, as it depends on the release dates – a case in point is SQL Server 2005.

The Mainstream Support End Date for SQL Server 2005 is the 12th of April 2011 and Service Pack 4 for SQL Server 2005 had a General Availability on the 13th of December 2010. Despite the fact that Service Pack 4 for SQL Server 2005 will be released a little over 4 months prior to the Mainstream Support End Date, support for SQL Server 2005 will still end on the 12th of April 2011.

The support policy is that support ends 12 months after the next service pack releases or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first. In the case of SQL Server 2005, the Mainstream Support End Date for the product is prior to 12 months after the release of the latest service pack. For more details on the SQL Server product support lifecycle refer to here or phone WARDY IT Solutions on 1300 SQL DBA (927 394).

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Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 11.0

The SQL Server 11.0 release (code-named Denali) introduces a new data warehouse query acceleration feature based on a new type of index called the columnstore. This new index, combined with enhanced query processing features, improves data warehouse query performance by hundreds to thousands of times in some cases, and can routinely give a tenfold speedup for a broad range of decision support queries. A white paper outlining the Columnstore Indexes for data warehouse query processing in SQL Server 11.0 can be found here.

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SQL Server Training

Are you looking for deep SQL Server training from experts that work day-to-day in the trenches on some of the largest SQL Server sites? Each WARDY IT Solutions SQL Server training course is delivered by a consultant that works in the field. You can download the full WARDY IT Solutions training schedule here and book online here for these not to be missed training events.

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New Zealand ALM Conference

The inaugural New Zeeland ALM conference is being held in Wellington on the 6th & 7th of April. This conference is being delivered by some of New Zealand’s best known industry speakers as well as speakers from WARDY IT Solutions. This conference focuses on Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management and includes post conference training focusing on SQL Server Denali and all the latest features in SQL Server 2008 R2. You can register for this post conference training here.

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Spatial Features in SQL Server Denali

SQL Server code-named Denali introduces several significant enhancements to spatial types, such as support for new subtypes of circular arcs, new and updated methods and aggregates for all subtypes, improved precision, and updates to the geography type. Full details of these spatial features can be found in a white paper that can downloaded from here.

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SQL Server Healthcheck

Does your SQL Server environment need a Healthcheck? The WARDY IT Solutions SQL Server Healthcheck is designed to review and verify the implementation of common SQL Server Best Practices. Our Database Healthcheck includes all the usage and administration aspects of a SQL Server database, ensuring that your SQL Servers are managed and operated well. Our approach is to analyse the total health of your SQL Server environment and highlight areas of concern, providing recommendations to improve the health and performance of your database environment. For more details on our SQL Server Healthcheck refer here.

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Qure Workload Analyzer

Qure Workload Analyzer is a free solution for analyzing and comparing SQL Server trace files. Using the intuitive graphical interface, you will be able to identify and analyze performance bottlenecks. You can download this free tool from here.

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Virtualize SQL Server with Hyper-V and System Center

SQL Server is a core component of any virtualized environment and together with Hyper-V, delivers enhanced virtualization manageability through System Center, lowers database TCO, and provides a single point of contact for the service and support of the full Microsoft stack. For more details on how SQL Server can be virtualised using Hyper-V and System Center refer to here.

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SQL Server Virtual DBA

For the second year running our Virtual DBA was a finalist in the QLD Australian Computer Society Awards QLD ICT Awards for Service Delivery and Training. Virtual DBA was also nominated as a finalist for the QLD AIIA iAwards.

Something you may not know is that our Virtual DBA can be utilised for phone and email support. So, if your organisation just needs someone that they can call on for advice then why not use a Virtual DBA?

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