| Executive Summary: For our 2008 Editors' Best Awards, SQL Server Magazine editors have selected the 12 best products from the hundreds we've learned about in the past year. Developers and administrators who need to squeeze the most out of a Microsoft SQL Server environment will find what they need here. |
The SQL Server Magazine Editors’
Best awards honor the outstanding
products and services that our editors
and contributors have seen over the past
year. Every year we research, review, and talk
to vendors and readers about dozens of new
products, and determining the best of all of
them isn’t easy.
After narrowing down all the possibilities
to the top contenders in 12 categories,
we polled our fellow editors and contributors
and asked them to judge each product on three
criteria. First, what is the product’s strategic
importance to the market? Second, does it
offer superlative performance and technical
innovation? And finally, does it provide an impressive
price-performance ratio that makes it
a compelling value? After weeks of debating,
arguing, and cajoling, we came up with our list
of winners, and we’re proud to unveil our Editors’
Best awards for 2008.
These products can help you create, manage,
deploy, optimize, recover, and otherwise
squeeze the most out of your SQL Server environment.
They’re easily the best products that
we’ve yet seen in the SQL Server ecosystem.
We also know that you, the readers of
SQL Server Magazine, have your own opinions
about which products are praiseworthy
and which ones you wouldn’t recommend
even to your back-stabbing rival in the next
cubicle. That’s why we’ve created a special
category in the SQL Server Magazine online
forums (www.sqlmag.com) for our Editors’
Best awards, and we invite you to join in the
discussion and share your opinions about the
best (and worst) SQL Server products you’ve
seen and used. Feel free to let us know if you
disagree with our choices!
Product
of the Year
Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor 5400 Series
Intel • www.intel.com
Few products have the ability to turn an industry on
its ear, but that’s exactly what Intel has done with the
Quad-Core Xeon Processor 5400 Series. Massive database
servers and the sprawling data-driven applications that depend on them can
bring puny single- and dual-core processors to their wobbly, silicon knees. AMD,
Intel’s primary rival, put forth a competing solution that suffered from production
delays and setbacks, leaving Intel as the clear market leader in this burgeoning
high-end segment of the CPU market. The benchmark-crushing performance
that Intel’s Quad-Core CPUs provide can result in huge cost savings for DBAs
tasked with squeezing maximum performance out of enormous (and enormously
complex) databases.
Shannon Poulin, director of the Server Platforms Marketing Group at Intel, says
that his company worked closely with the SQL Server software community to ensure
that Intel’s architecture worked with parallelized applications such as SQL Server
2005 and that reduced power consumption and increased performance will continue
hand-in-hand. “We’ve delivered an increasing amount of performance in the same
energy consumption envelope,” says Poulin.
SQL Server Magazine Technical Director Michael Otey agrees, pointing out that
Intel’s Quad-Core processors allow certain applications to take advantage of that
extra processing power. “Enterprise-level database servers such as Microsoft SQL
Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 can take full advantage of all CPUs that are present,
as can virtualization software,” says Otey. “Because these types of applications
are designed for multiprocessor support, they can initiate separate threads on the
individual processors of multicore systems.”
The rapid growth of virtualization technology and
the imminent arrival of SQL Server 2008 might be
garnering lots of attention these days, but you can
count on this: Most of those impressive new software
applications will be powered by more than a
few burly Intel Quad-Core processors.
—Jeff James
See associated figure
Breakthrough Product
Microsoft Visual
Studio 2008
Microsoft
www.microsoft.com
Although lots of media attention
has been focused
on the release of Windows
Server 2008 and SQL Server
2008, Microsoft Visual Studio
(VS) 2008 had the distinction of hitting the market
first. The latest version of Microsoft’s ubiquitous
IDE offers dozens of improvements and features for
programmers, including .NET Framework improvements,
support for updated versions of C# and Visual
Basic, and an updated version of Microsoft Foundation
Classes (MFC 9.0).
For the SQL Server community, the most significant
new feature in VS 2008 is its support for Language
Integrated Query (LINQ), a Microsoft .NET
Framework component that introduces data querying
to .NET languages. It’s big news for database
developers, and many think it could change the way
SQL Server databases are developed.
According to Gert Drapers, group engineering
manager on the VS 2008 team, feedback
from SQL Server developers has
been positive. “LINQ and the entity
data model are popular,” says Drapers.
“There’s now less distance between the
application and data tiers, which helps in
overall application development.”
“LINQ is quite possibly the biggest
paradigm change for database developers
since the advent of ODBC,” says Michael
Otey. “LINQ eliminates the languagedatabase
disconnect and enables objectoriented
database access through SQL-like extensions
to VB or C#. Considering that LINQ is still in its early
stages, it might be a while before you have to start worrying
about converting your applications to use LINQ,
but there’s little doubt that LINQ and DLinq represent
the future of database development.”
—Jeff James
See associated figure
Continue to page 2