SQL Server Magazine September 2004

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2004 Readers' Choice Awards
Find out which products readers named best in class in 55 categories. Then, see how backup and restore products LiteSpeed for SQL Server and UltraBac stack up, and evaluate Crystal Enterprise and SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.
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[Focus]

BI Favorites Help Users Strike Gold

Business intelligence (BI) gives organizations the ability to strike gold in the mountain of information they already have. The winners in our 5 BI product categories are...

Dell Claims Best Hardware Award

Readers' Choice voters overwhelmingly named Dell best in hardware, citing the company's great prices, Web site, and quality.

Dell, IBM Servers Meet Your Needs

Servers, the hardware at the heart of your computing infrastructure, come in a seemingly endless array of processor, memory, storage, networking, and expandability options. Readers' Choice voters selected the server systems that best suited their needs.

Imceda Takes 4 Top Awards

Imceda products and services won four of the top five awards in SQL Server Magazine's 2004 Readers' Choice contest: Best Software, Most Innovative Product, Best Service and Support, and Best New Product.

Integration Capabilities Key to Business Applications

Readers based their votes for favorite business applications on a commitment to gaining competitive advantage through superior information and software flexibility, ease of use, and integration capabilities.

Investigating Reporting

SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services is causing a stir among report-weary DBAs everywhere. Is it an alternative to Business Objects’ Crystal Enterprise? This side-by-side comparison will help you make an informed choice for your organization.

Lab Report: LiteSpeed and UltraBac

For database backup, Imceda LiteSpeed for SQL Server and UltraBac give you backup to a hard disk and good data compression. LiteSpeed might be the fastest database-backup software, but UltraBac offers strong management capabilities.

Readers Choose Tools to Streamline Administration

Multi-tasking SQL Server professionals need tools that help them automate database administration tasks. Readers chose winning administration products in 10 categories.

Readers Passionate About Favorite Development Tools

See what products readers voted as their favorites in SQL Server development.

Readers Vote Dell Products Masters of Storage

According to readers, capacity, availability, and speed are the most important considerations when choosing storage products. More than half of the Readers' Choice voters selected Dell products as winners in our two storage categories.

Service Providers: Readers Demand Reliability, Speed, Support

Readers who use service providers to host the infrastructure for applications such as SQL Server look for fast and reliable servers and networks, deep expertise, and responsive customer support.

Voters Honor Top Technical Resources

SQL Server professionals needing to quickly get up to speed in specific technology areas or wanting to increase their knowledge and boost their careers are seeking technical resources that provide quality, in-depth content in an easy-to-digest format.

Winners Help You Prevent, Recover from Disasters

If you face the challenge of safeguarding your company's data, you want to avert problems whenever possible and recover from the inevitable instances when disaster strikes.

Winning Management Tools Enhance SQL Server Functionality

SQL Server is packed with built-in functionality, but in these five categories readers chose winning products that add to those existing tools and, in many cases, work across platforms.

Winning Products Secure Databases and Applications

Winning products in our Readers' Choice Awards for security.




[Features]

Web Services Made Easy

Let the SQL Sever 2000 Web Services Toolkit turn you into a Web services wizard as you build this sample telephone-directory application.




[SQL Server Savvy]

IDENTITY() Function Isn't Reliable for Imposing Order on a Result Set

T-SQL is a powerful tool, but it doesn't provide native language constructs to do all the operations you need to do, such as creating rank within a result set. This tip highlights a dangerous technique that's commonly used impose rank.




[Editorial]

Waiting for Yukon

Although Yukon delays aren’t hurting existing SQL Server customers, the persistent postponements are hurting SQL Server’s position in a competitive database marketplace.




[Inside SQL Server]

Mixed Extent Usage

Larger page sizes in SQL Server 7.0 and later can lead to more wasted space when SQL Server allocates pages to a table that doesn’t use them. Learn how pages are allocated in your tables.




[New Products]

New Products, September 2004

Check out the latest SQL Server-related new and improved products.




[SELECT TOP(X)]

T-SQL's Datetime Data Type

Michael Otey answers six commonly asked questions about the SQL Server datetime data type.




[Lessons from the Field]

Minding Memory

Understanding how SQL Server uses memory is an essential step in performance tuning. Members of Microsoft’s SQL Server Development Customer Advisory Team show you how they find information about SQL Server’s memory utilization.




[Ask Microsoft]

Deleting an IDENTITY Column

Gert Drapers of Microsoft's SQL Server development team describes how to delete an IDENTITY column.

Differential Backups

Richard Waymire of Microsoft's SQL Server development team clarifies when to use differential backups.

Storing Multimedia Data

Patrick Conlan of Microsoft's SQL Server development team recommends SQL Server's image data type or Windows Media Services for storing binary data.

Using DTS to Extract Data from Multiple Database Systems

Patrick Conlan of Microsoft's SQL Server development team describes how to use DTS as an ETL tool for creating a central reporting repository.