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

If you are about to embark on a long car journey you will normally get a safety inspection performed on the car to ensure that the tyre pressure, suspension and other key components are working 100%. The last thing you want to worry about is the stress and inconvenience of the car breaking down, especially with the family on-board. Well why should your database platform be any different?

Australia is about to enter the end of financial year which is the peak processing period for many organisations. To assist organisations ensure the safety of their SQL Server environment this financial year, WARDY IT Solutions have introduced a 33 Point SQL Server Safety Check. This check is designed to provide you with the confidence that the wheels don’t fall of your database platform.

As an introduction to this new service WARDY IT Solutions is offering a FREE 33 Point SQL Server Safety Check to the first 10 organisations to email contact@wardyit.com.

Happy Reading

Peter Ward

^top

Using PowerPivot to Analyze SAP Data

One of the challenges for people using SAP is that despite the fact that SAP has a number of BI tools, very few of the tools allow end users to work directly with the data in a familiar environment like Microsoft Excel. The SAP BI tools also have limited functionality to easily integrate other non-SAP data sources. PowerPivot can be used with SAP to enable business users to engage in managed self-service business intelligence. To find out more about how PowerPivot can be used with SAP refer to here.

^top

SQL Server Migration Assistant

SQL Server Migration Assistant is a family of products that assists in automating the migration and replatforming of Oracle, Sybase, MySQL and Microsoft Access databases to SQL server or SQL Azure. For more information and to download this free utility refer to here.

^top

SQL Server Compression Estimator

The SQL Server Compression Estimator (SSCE) is a CodePlex project that provides you the ability to estimate the best compression for your objects. It will estimate both ROW and PAGE compression for all objects, and will optionally report the Index Maintenance Ratio. You can download this free utility from here.

^top

Expert SQL Server Training

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

^top

SQL Server Cost Recovery White Paper

One of the challenges facing the IT departments of many organizations today is who pays for the operational support of the SQL Server databases that are used by the business? WARDY IT Solutions has written a white paper that explores the implementation of SQL Server Cost Recovery to recover the costs associated with database management. This white paper can be downloaded here.

^top

SQL Azure Migration Wizard

SQL Azure Migration Wizard (SQLAzureMW) is a utility that is designed to help you migrate your SQL Server 2005/2008 databases to SQL Azure. The Migration Wizard allows you to fully or partially migrate your database schema and data to SQL Azure. For more information on how to migrate you existing database to SQL Azure refer to here.

^top

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.

^top

Vision for Analysis Services

Since the announcement of the SQL Server ‘Denali’ BI Semantic Model (BISM) there has been a lot of concerns surrounding the future of SQL Server Business Intelligence. During TechEd 2011, Microsoft announced an update to its BI roadmap. You can find out more about the Vision for Analysis Services here.

^top

Using SQL Server BI in the Education Sector

Typically when you think Business Intelligence you think about financial information such as sales or profit and loss. However Business Intelligence is the application of knowledge derived from analysing an organization’s data to affect a more positive outcome. WARDY IT Solutions have developed a number of analytical solutions that can be used in the education sector. A video demo of how learning management data can be utilised can be found here.

^top

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?

^top