Welcome to the January WARDY IT Solutions SQL Server Newsletter

I hope that 2008 has started out well for you and that you had a great festive season. A lot of people have asked what happened to the December newsletter? Well to be perfectly honest the week before Christmas my wife and I moved houses and by the time I realised what was happening it was already January!

January is typically a time for reflection to take stock of the last 12 months and start planning for the year ahead. Over the last 12 months SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 and Performance Point Server were released and database professionals have started to come to terms with what the Entity Framework means for the future. If we look forward to the year ahead the major game changer will be the release of SQL Server 2008.

Happy Reading

Peter Ward

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February WARDY IT Community Dinner

The WARDY IT Community Dinner is a casual event for IT professionals in South East Queensland. It is a fun way to meet new people and find out how other IT professionals are dealing with the challenges that we face every day. The February WARDY IT Dinner is being held on Monday the 11th of February at the Himalayan Cafe, New Farm. Add this event to your Outlook Calendar.

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February SQL Server User Groups

This month at the QLD SQL Server User Group, don't miss the opportunity to see Kalen Delaney present on SQL Server Architecture, Internals and Optimisation. For more detail regarding this event refer to here.

For details of SQL Server User Group events in other Australian cities refer to the Australian SQL Server User Groups website.

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SQL Nexus

SQL Nexus is a SQL Server performance analysis tool that assists in identifying the root cause of SQL Server performance issues. The tool analyses the data collected by SQLDiag and PSSDiag in order to reduce the laborious tasks of analysing performance statistics. The SQL Nexus Codeplex project can be found here.

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TableDiff GUI

In the January 2006 SQL Server newsletter we highlighted the table comparison tool TableDiff.exe that ships with SQL Server 2005. Mladen Prajdic has created a GUI for this utility which can be downloaded from here.

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Unicode Best Practices

In today's global economy, it is increasingly necessary for database systems to support multilingual characters in the database tables. A new white paper has been released that provides guidance on how to alter existing non-unicode database systems to support Unicode data types. This whitepaper can be downloaded from here.

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Cheap SQL Server Training

It can cost thousands of dollars to attend training with the world's leading SQL Server practitioners. So if you are looking for SQL Server training at prices that anyone can afford. why not check out SQLServerDVD? The first DVD with Kalen Delaney is available to pre-order for only US$19.95 plus postage. For more detail about these great DVD's refer to here.

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Log Shipping and Database Mirroring

A new white paper has been released which documents how Log shipping and database mirroring can be used together for high availability and disaster recovery. Although Microsoft only supports a single mirror database, the white paper describes how you can set up log shipping from a database mirroring pair to additional servers to provide multiple failover sites. The white paper can be downloaded from here.

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SQL Formatter

One of the challenges with reading any type of code is understanding the format being used by the developer. Often I will see people reformat the code before they even start to look at it. SQL Formatter is an online tool to beautify SQL in various formats. So not matter what your formatting preferences are, SQL Formatter can be customised to provide the desired layout. SQL Formatter can be found here.

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What's new is SQL Server 2008

A new Virtual Lab has been released to introduce Database Administrators to the new features in SQL Server 2008. This lab covers topic such as the new date data types and how to implement a Declarative Management Framework (DMF). This Virtual Lab can be accessed here.

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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 .

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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