SQL Server Magazine

Last year, SQL Server Magazine celebrated the first annual Editor's Choice Awards. The awards return this year to recognize the vendors who bring you outstanding database products and services. To determine the winners, we collected the products we've covered in SQL Server Magazine in product reviews, Industry Bytes, Buyer's Guides, New Products, and Market Watch features since March 2006 and distributed them among eight product categories. This year, we've added a special ninth category, Most Innovative Technology, to allow us to recognize worthy products that don't fit neatly into the eight regular categories. The editors of SQL Server Magazine then chose platinum and gold winners in the regular categories and one winner of Most Innovative Technology. We considered each product's strategic value to the market, its competitive advantages, and its value to customers to determine the winners. These products help you solve database problems, manage your databases, improve database performance, create, innovate, and excel. They are among the best of the SQL Server–related software, hardware, and services the market has produced over the past year.

Auditing and Compliance
Lumigent Audit DB
Compliance with laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requires that a company ensure the security and integrity of its data. To do so, you've got to be able to audit internal users' database access. SQL Server 2005 provides no user auditing per se, although you can use built-in features such as DDL triggers to track database events. This year's platinum winner in the Auditing and Compliance category, Lumigent Audit DB, gives a hefty boost to SQL Server database auditing by supporting three types of data collection: transaction log reading, network capture, and native database auditing. You can select any combination of collection methods depending on the type of auditing and compliance requirements you need to meet. The product comprises two modules: an assessment module establishes a baseline of your database environment security, then continually assesses the environment against that baseline; an activity monitoring module lets a DBA set actions that will create an alert and provides an audit trail of authorized users' database access. The comprehensive alerting and reporting features in Lumigent Audit DB place it in a class above other products of this type, providing in-depth insight into audit information that a DBA can use to take action to correct potential risks to data. Contact Lumigent at http://www.lumigent.com/products/auditdb.html

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Guardium Data Privacy Accelerator
Judging from this year's headlines about data loss at high-profile companies, it's clear that organizations need to get a handle on preventing data theft, especially theft by insiders. Data-monitor, a vertical-industry research firm, gauges that the average cost of a data leak incident is $1.82 million and that only a few firms can say with certainty that they've had no data leaks recently. This year's Auditing and Compliance category gold winner, Guardium Data Privacy Accelerator, an add-on to the company's SQL Guard compliance solution, provides auditing with an eye toward protecting sensitive data against theft, including data breaches by privileged users inside an organization. Data Privacy Accelerator provides a set of policies, real-time alerts, and audit reports to detail suspicious database activity. A DBA creates privacy sets that contain sensitive data elements (e.g., customer names with credit card numbers). The product generates alerts when access to a data element deviates from an expected pattern (e.g., an unusually high volume of requests for data in a privacy set or access outside of regular business hours) as well as an audit trail of such transactions. Data Privacy Accelerator gives organizations an edge on not only preventing data breaches, but also on stopping them in real time. Contact Guardium at http://www.guardium.com.
—Anne Grubb

Backup and Recovery
Quest Software LiteSpeed for SQL Server
The 2006 Editors' Choice award platinum winner in the Backup and Remote/Disaster Recovery category, Quest Software's LiteSpeed for SQL Server takes platinum this year in the Backup and Recovery category. LiteSpeed for SQL Server offers table-level recovery, which gives you the option to restore only the objects you need while avoiding disrupting user access to databases. The software's compression technology impresses SQL Server Magazine Technical Director Michael Otey: "The cool thing about the LiteSpeed product is that it is able to both compress and encrypt the backups. Compression is especially useful because it reduces the size of the backup, but it also reduces the time required to perform the backup because there is significantly less I/O." A unique feature to LiteSpeed for SQL Server is the Attached File option, which lets you attach documentation to database archives. That documentation is then restored with the database during recovery operations. LiteSpeed for SQL Server also verifies the integrity of backups during a restore, provides a wide variety of reporting formats, and contains its own advanced log shipping functionality that reduces log size and increases log transfer speed. "This product also has a simple-to-use T-SQL interface that make it easy for DBAs to work into their T-SQL scripts," Michael adds. Contact Quest Software at http://www.quest.com/litespeed_for_sql_server

Idera SQLsafe
Taking gold in the Backup and Recovery category is Idera's SQLsafe. Pat Mong, a senior database administrator at a major coatings and specialty products company, uses SQLsafe to back up nearly 100 SQL servers with a total of 1,800 databases, averaging around 5,000 backups a day. Pat says, "We rarely have any problems, but when we do, Idera's support team is always very responsive to my issues. Idera has also been very receptive to ideas for product improvement." Not only are customer and technical support important to Pat, but he adds that Idera's pricing helped to win him over. "Our purchasing department and Idera negotiated a nice price for the SQLsafe product. Idera has never tried to change the price we pay for additional product licenses." Before SQLsafe came out, Pat tried SQL LiteSpeed, now Quest Software LiteSpeed for SQL Server (and the platinum winner in this category). He says, "When SQLsafe first came out, it had several attractive features that SQL LiteSpeed didn't have. Enterprise management was one. The SQLsafe product came with all available features at no extra cost." Pat enjoys the relationship his company and Idera have built: "They are all nice people, interested in building products solely for Microsoft SQL Server instead of trying to build SQL products for Oracle and DB2." Contact Idera at http://www.idera.com/products/sqlsafe/default.aspx
—Caroline Marwitz

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Business Intelligence and Reporting
BusinessObjects X1 R2
Business Objects' BusinessObjects XI R2 is the platinum winner in the Business Intelligence and Reporting category. Business Objects XI R2 is a suite of performance management, information management, and query and analysis tools that offers multiple data-access methods; secure, on-demand live-data call-up; and an elegant visual presentation. Former Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Magazine Assistant Editor Sue Tibbetts, reporting on BusinessObjects XI R2 in the December 2006 "Industry Briefings" (InstantDoc ID 93481), remarked that, "Information consumers don't have time to learn how to use a reporting tool . . . They want to intuitively know how to make a program ‘serve up' the information they need quickly and in a format they understand." BusinessObjects XI R2 meets this need by taking aggregated, complicated, and massive data sets and distilling the information into graphical renderings that end users can instantly understand. Crystal Xcelsius Viewer, BusinessObjects XI R2's front end, uses flash technology and prebuilt templates to create a drag-and-drop environment within which DBAs can interact with complex data quickly and easily. Contact Business Objects at http://www.businessobjects.com

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Tableau Software Tableau
Winning gold in this year's Business Intelligence and Reporting category is Tableau Software's Tableau visual analysis and reporting solution. Available in three versions: Professional Edition, Professional Open – DB Edition, and Standard Edition, Tableau lets you analyze database servers, data warehouses, Excel spreadsheets, and text files. SQL Server Magazine Technical Editor Michael Otey says Tableau "quickly and effectively reveals data relationships and anomalies that might take hours, or even days, for a traditional database tool such as Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables to identify." Building queries is an easy drag-and-drop process that doesn't require knowledge of SQL or MDX, and Tableau automatically builds a visual representation of query results. Tableau makes it easy to filter data, and you can drill down through information by right-clicking a bar graph to access the underlying data. You can print query results, save the results as an image, or export the results to Access or Excel. Tableau's rich, versatile interface gives users the power to effectively and quickly visualize and analyze their data, without the need to understand programming or undergo specialized training. Contact Tableau Software at http://www.tableausoftware.com/products.htm.
—Sam Davenport

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