Welcome to the March 2013 newsletter from Australia's leading SQL Server Consultants, Trainers and Business Intelligence specialists

The start of 2013 has been an exciting start to the calendar year. Not only has WARDY IT Solutions relocated their head-office but four more SQL Server specialist have joined the WARDY IT Solutions team as full-time employees, taking the team to 34 specialists located throughout Australia.

2013 has also seen WARDY IT Solutions launch the website SQL Server Quiz to allow you to test your SQL Server knowledge against your colleagues and have the chance to win a $50 Amazon gift voucher every week!

WARDY IT Solutions has just announced Australia’s industry leading Microsoft SQL Server conference – SQL Server InFocus. The conference is being held at Jupiter’s, Gold Coast on the two days prior to Microsoft TechEd Australia on the 2nd and 3rd of September to allow you to maximize your professional development investment. SQL Server InFocus will feature over 24 deep-dive sessions from industry leading experts from around the globe running in two tracks, Business Intelligence and Data Platform. This conference will provide with real-world information to empower you as a SQL Server professional and provide you with unparalleled opportunities to develop connections with peers and experts. Pre-Registration is now available so make sure you save the date in your calendar.

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

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SQL Server Quiz

Are you looking to prove your SQL Server knowledge and have a chance to win a $50 Amazon gift voucher each week? Why not checkout SQL Server Quiz and put you knowledge to the test. Find our more here.

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Business Intelligence Authentication and Identity Delegation

The term Microsoft BI refers to a stack of Microsoft Office and Microsoft SQL Server technologies for data analysis and reporting. These products and technologies provide the foundation for personal, team, and corporate BI solutions that can integrate multiple distributed Windows services, SharePoint applications, Web services, and data sources. In order to successfully integrate these technologies an understanding of Authentication and Identity Delegation is key. A new whitepaper has been release that details how to achieve this integration. To download the whitepaper refer to here.

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Microsoft in Leaders Quadrant for BI and Analytics Platforms

Once again, Gartner has positioned Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant in the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, based on its completeness of vision and ability to execute in the BI and analytics market. To find out more about Microsoft's positioning in the 2013 Magic Quadrant refer to here.

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Plan Caching and Recompilation in SQL Server 2012

A new whitepaper has been released that explains how SQL Server 2012 allocates memory for plan caching, how query batches are cached and suggests best practices on maximizing reuse of cached plans. It also explains scenarios in which batches are recompiled, and gives best practices for reducing or eliminating unnecessary recompilations and for minimizing plan cache pollution. You can download this whitepaper from here.

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Offloading Read-Only Workloads to Secondary Replicas

In Microsoft SQL Server 2012, the AlwaysOn Availability Groups technology can address a common requirement of your existing high availability solution: utilization of secondary servers to result in high ROI of the investment in hardware. With AlwaysOn Availability Groups, these otherwise inactive secondary servers can be utilized as readable secondary replicas. To find out more about implementing this feature refer to here.

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Resource Governor in SQL Server 2012

SQL Server 2012 delivers enhancements to the Resource Governor that reflect a growing need for centrally managed database services to provide multitenancy to customers who require isolated workloads. To find out more about the enhancements and why they were added 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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Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2012

SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2012 enables you to use the Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services project templates within the Visual Studio 2012 shell. You can download SQL Server Data Tools for Visual Studio 2012 here.

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SQL Server File Layout Viewer

Have you ever wanted an exploratory tool where you can more readily see how the individual data pages in MDF/NDF files are organized, where your tables and indexes live, what effect operations like index rebuild or index reorganize have on the physical layout of the data pages? Well with SQL Server File Layout Viewer you now can. Using SQL Server File Layout Viewer you can generate a color-coded representation of all the data pages in a database. To find out more and download this free tool refer to here.

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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 second 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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