Welcome to the December newsletter from Australia's leading SQL Server Consultants and Trainers

• We were awarded the Microsoft APC 2009 Data Management Partner of the Year

• We were a finalist for the ACS Queensland ICT Awards for Service Delivery and Training
• Business Acumen named WARDY IT Solutions as the Partner of Choice for SQL Server
• We opened an office in Hobart
• We continued to demonstrate our deep technical understanding of SQL Server though participation in early adoption programs for SQL Server 2008 R2
• We were awarded support contracts for some of the largest SQL Server installations in Australia

Happy Reading

Peter Ward

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Australian ALM Conference

Embrace IT Events is organising the first annual Australian ALM Conference which will incorporate Microsoft Australia's Official Launch event for Visual Studio 2010. The conference will run over two days in Sydney in April. There will also be two days of post conference training available. For more details on this conference and to register your interest refer to here.

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AutoAudit

AutoAudit takes the hassle out of generating audit triggers for SQL Server 2005 and 2008. AutoAudit is open source Code-Generation utility that can create Audit Trail Triggers automatically. This free utility can be downloaded from here.

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SQL Server Scalability

A question that is often asked is just how far SQL Server can scale. Well SQL Server 2008 R2 now supports 256 Processors. To get at taste for what a machine with 256 Processors looks like then refer to here.

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Optimizations to Improve Data Warehousing Queries

More and more organizations rely on data warehouses to make insightful decisions with knowledge obtained from analysing tremendous amounts of data. A new whitepaper has been released that demonstrates two of the techniques that can be used in SQL Server 2008 to assist with performance. This whitepaper on Using Star Join and Few-Outer-Row Optimizations can be found here.

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Monitoring Free Space in TEMPDB Transaction Log

As part of your database monitoring, you should be keeping track of the free space in the transaction log. One reason to do this, is to detect a rogue query consuming too much transaction log space. The SQLCAT blog has a recent post that describes some of the intricacies when monitoring the TEMPDB Transaction Log. This blog post can be found here.

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SQL Server MVP Deep Dives

SQL Server MVP Deep Dives is no ordinary SQL Server Book. The book brings together the world's most highly-regarded SQL Server experts to create a masterful collection of tips, techniques and experience-driven best practices for SQL Server development and administration. 100% of the royalties for this book will be donated to support War Child International. The book can be ordered 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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PowerPivot for SharePoint and Excel

With the recent release of the November CTP for SQL Server 2008 R2 comes the availability of the PowerPivot (formerly known as Project Gemini) add-in for Excel which provides non-expert BI users the ability to create powerful BI solutions using Excel whilst PowerPivot for SharePoint facilitates the online hosting, sharing and collaboration of these BI solutions in SharePoint. To download the CTP or PowerPivot refer to here.

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Crystal Reports to Reporting Services

WARDY IT Solutions has been working with a number of Enterprise customers to assist them realise the benefits and cost savings from migrating their reporting platform from Crystal Reports to SQL Server Reporting Services. If you would like to know more about the benefits on offer and how our IP can assist to simplify the migration then email contact@wardyit.com.

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SQL Server Virtual DBA

Virtual DBA was recently featured at the Microsoft Enterprise Product Roadmap Event. To find out more about our participation in this event refer to here.

Virtual DBA was a finalist in the QLD Australian Computer Society Awards QLD ICT Awards for Service Delivery and Training.

Something you may not know is that our Virtual DBA service 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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