Featured Article(s)
Troubleshooting SQL Server 2005 Log Shipping
In this article, Alexander Chigrik explains some problems that you can have when you work with SQL Server 2005 log shipping. He also tells how you can resolve these problems.
Help and Tips for Performance Monitoring
Have you ever tried to hunt down a performance problem, had to find out first where to look and second what to do if you can find the issue on your system? It’s a common issue. From monitoring mirrored databases to automated alerts to simply getting a comprehensive look at your servers,Idera’s new SQL Diagnostic Manager 6.0 answers all of these questions and a lot more. Take a look – try it out on your own systems – see the types of information and help it can provide. Get more information here.
New SQL Server 2008 R2 Features
The upcoming R2 release of SQL Server 2008 will have a heavy BI focus – it will bring some interesting things to users and integrate even more fully into the Office suite. I first wrote about this during a TechEd a couple of years ago – Microsoft had been talking about making SQL Server and the Office applications more natively integrated and more able to do BI-related tasks. The full intent of the work was to bring BI to the masses using the Office tools as the front end for the day-to-day query and reporting.
It’s been clear for quite some time that one of the harder hurdles for BI is the accessibility of information, data and meaningful analysis tools to the every day user. If we can build tools, data slice-and-dice tools and give access to information by using the applications (Office) users are already involved with, it could be a huge win for everyone. By taking these essential capabilities and giving them directly to the users, you can focus your application development time on the more unique challenges, while not sacrificing what users need daily in terms of research and reporting.
One of the things I am anxious to see is the administrative portion of the access to the information. If we’re going to give these types of tools to users, the age-old question quickly comes into play. How do we protect the data, or the use of the data, when more open access is granted. Will there be additional tools on the client-side of the equation to allow for management of information? Will the controls reside solely in SQL Server and fall back to permissions, views and access controls?
Clearly we’ll have to wait and see, but I personally hope that there are some great tools to address the security and use of information, in addition to the work being done to make it more simple to access and manipulate information in the database.
Featured White Paper(s)
Scale Out SQL Server and Eliminate Outages with Database Virtualization
This technical white paper illustrates how you can leverage active-active database clustering technology to deliver scale-out… (read more)