Welcome to the June 2014 newsletter from Australia's leading SQL Server Consultants, Trainers and Business Intelligence specialists

So what were you doing six years ago in 2008 when SQL Server 2008 was released?

In 2008;

• Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations
• Barack Obama becomes the first African-American to be elected President of the United States
• Bill Gates steps down as Chairman of Microsoft Corporation

The same way that a lot has changed in the world at large the same can be said for Microsoft SQL Server. Since these historic events four releases of SQL Server have been released: SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2014. As a result the 8th of July 2014 signals the end of main stream support for both SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2. You can find out more about the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy for SQL Server here.

WARDY IT Solutions is offering a complimentary assessment to assist you upgrade your legacy SQL Server environment to an environment that is in main stream support. To learn more about how you can benefit from this upgrade assessment contact WARDY IT Solutions today.

While we are talking about upgrades when was the last time you applied a SQL Server Service Pack to ensure the availability and reliability of your critical SQL Server instances? Did you know that WARDY IT Solutions provides a fixed fee service to ensure your SQL Server environment is fully supported and to maximize the availability and reliability of the topology? To find out more about our fixed priced Service Pack service give me a call today on 1300 WARDY IT (927 394).

You can keep updated on all the latest WARDY IT Solutions SQL Server news on Facebook & Twitter:

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SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2

SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 has been released and is now available for download. SQL Server 2012 SP2 contains updates based on customer feedback since the last service pack and since the release of Cumulative Update 9. The Service Pack includes supportability and functionality fixes to AlwaysOn and also includes local cube creation support as well as some performance fixes to the relational engine and storage engine. SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 can be downloaded from here.

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SQL Server 2014 Training

WARDY IT Solutions is now offering the SQL Server 2014 training course Updating Your SQL Server Skills to MS SQL Server 2014 (Course Code 10977). This five-day instructor-led hands on course teaches participants how to use the enhancements and new features that have been added to SQL Server and the Microsoft data platform since the release of SQL Server 2008. The course focuses on teaching individuals how to use SQL Server 2014 product features and other Microsoft data platform components. To find out more about this and other SQL Server training course refer to here.

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Microsoft Azure Machine Learning

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning is a fully-managed cloud service for building predictive analytics solutions that helps to overcome the challenges most businesses have in deploying and using machine learning. To find out more about this service refer to here.

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Microsoft StreamInsight 2.3

To coincide with the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2014, Microsoft StreamInsight has been updated to version 2.3. You can get a copy of StreamInsight 2.3 from the SQL Server 2014 Feature Pack located in the Microsoft Download Center here.

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Analysis Services MOLAP Performance Guide

A new white paper has been released that describes how business intelligence developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their OLAP solutions running on Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. You can download this white paper from here here.

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Availability Groups on Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Services

AlwaysOn Availability Groups are now supported between Microsoft Azure Regions. In the context of Azure Infrastructure Services, this significantly increases the availability of Availability Groups during Microsoft Azure’s VM Service Healing (e.g. due to physical hardware failures), platform upgrades, or patching of the guest OS or SQL Server. To find out more about configuring SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups between Microsoft Azure Regions refer to 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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Reporting Services Performance Optimization

If you are looking for technical guidance for Reporting Services then the Reporting Services Performance Optimization white paper should be your first stop. This technical white paper is designed to assist you to optimize your Reporting Services architecture for better performance and higher report execution throughput and user loads. You can find this white paper here.

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Free Exam Voucher

WARDY IT Solutions provides a bonus for all 5 Day Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) SQL Server training course. When you book any 5 Day MOC training you receive a FREE Prometric Exam Voucher. To take advantage of this offer contact us today.

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SQL Server Virtual DBA

WARDY IT Solutions Virtual DBA service was named one of Australia's 100 most innovative products or services for the third year running in the Anthill Magazine 'SMART 100' Index.

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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