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

Earlier in May at Tech-Ed 2009 in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced some of the new innovations that will be in the next release of SQL Server. It is expected that the next release, SQL Server 2008 R2 (formerly SQL Server ‘Kilimanjaro’) will be available in 2010. To find out more about what the new release of SQL Server means to your organisation than why not contact WARDY IT Solutions, Australia's leading SQL Server consultants and trainers.

Due to popular demand we have extended our free lunch time presentation offer. During June WARDY IT Solutions is offering a limited number of free lunchtime seminars onsite in your workplace. Not only will we provide a free catered lunch for your team, we will also provide a free informative 90 minute presentation on some of the new features in SQL Server 2008. To register your interest in a free lunchtime session at your office email contact@wardyit.com.

If you are thinking of upgrading from an earlier version of SQL Server or from another database platform make sure you contact WARDY IT Solutions who are the Partner of Choice for SQL Server. Below is the feedback we received from a recent project migrating over 200 Crystal Reports to SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services:

"We are extremely impressed with WARDY IT Solutions knowledge about SQL Server. Their team were able to seamlessly migrate our existing reporting platform and provide our team with the skills to support SQL Server. We have found a partner that understands our business and is able to deliver all of our SQL Server requirements."

- David Adams, Planar Systems

Happy Reading

Peter Ward

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Training with SQL Server Expert Kalen Delaney

SQL Server expert Kalen Delaney, the author of Inside SQL Server and the new SQL Server 2008 Internals, is a special guest in Australia for WARDY IT Solutions. Kalen will be presenting two must see one-day seminars in Australia; SQL Server Index Internals in Canberra on August 17 and Brisbane on August 19; SQL Server Storage Formats in Melbourne on August 15 and Sydney on August 24.

There are a limited number of places available for each course, so make sure you don't delay your booking. To make a booking simply email contact@wardyit.com.

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Free SQL Server Breakfast

SQL Server consolidation continues to be a challenge for many organisations. WARDY IT Solutions is running a free SQL Server Breakfast event on Thursday the 7th of August focusing on SQL Server consolidation. In this session you will see how multiple databases can be consolidated to a single SQL Server 2008 server without sacrificing the goals of performance and availability. To register for this free Breakfast event email contact@wardyit.com.

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SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP

The next version of SQL Server is called SQL Server 2008 R2 and is scheduled for release in 2010. During the North American summer of 2009, Microsoft will offer a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2. To register to be one of the first people to see this new release refer to here.

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VSTS Essentials for Database Professionals

Development process specialists Enhance ALM have recently announced the availability of a brand new hands-on course for Visual Studio for Database Professionals. This course is designed to show how 'Data Dude' can be used in the database development process whilst improving collaboration and integrating database development with application development. For more details and to register for this course refer to here.

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Extended Events

Extended Events are a new feature in SQL Server 2008 for troubleshooting. Extended Events offer a new methodology and framework for capturing diagnostic information from the SQL Server Database Engine. A Whitepaper that explains how Extended Events can be use can be found here.

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Disk Alignment Whitepaper

Microsoft has released a new whitepaper on Disk Alignment for SQL Server. Disk Alignment is an often overlooked aspect of properly configuring hardware for SQL Server performance. You can find the whitepaper 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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SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guide

The SQL Server 2008 Compliance Guidance Whitepaper was written by Microsoft to help organizations understand how to use the features of SQL Server 2008 to address their compliance needs. The Whitepaper can be downloaded from here.

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Data Compression Best Practices

The data compression feature in SQL Server 2008 helps compress the data inside a database, and it can help reduce the size of the database. A new Whitepaper on Data Compression Strategy, Capacity Planning and Best Practices can be found 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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