2004 Readers' Choice Awards

September 2004

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.

Dell, IBM Servers Meet Your Needs

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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.

Differential Backups

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

Deleting an IDENTITY Column

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

Lab Report: LiteSpeed and UltraBac

By Morris Lewis

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.

Winners Help You Prevent, Recover from Disasters

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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.

Integration Capabilities Key to Business Applications

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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.

Using DTS to Extract Data from Multiple Database Systems

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

Web Services Made Easy

By Rick Dobson

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

Mixed Extent Usage

By Kalen Delaney

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.

Storing Multimedia Data

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

Waiting for Yukon

By Michael Otey

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

Winning Products Secure Databases and Applications

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Winning products in our Readers' Choice Awards for security.

Dell Claims Best Hardware Award

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

Minding Memory

By Prakash Sundaresan

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.

T-SQL's Datetime Data Type

By Michael Otey

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

Imceda Takes 4 Top Awards

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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.

Readers Passionate About Favorite Development Tools

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

Investigating Reporting

By Scot J. Reagin

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.

New Products, September 2004

By Dawn Cyr

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

Readers Choose Tools to Streamline Administration

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

Winning Management Tools Enhance SQL Server Functionality

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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.

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

By Brian Moran

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.

Voters Honor Top Technical Resources

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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.

Readers Vote Dell Products Masters of Storage

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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.

BI Favorites Help Users Strike Gold

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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...

Service Providers: Readers Demand Reliability, Speed, Support

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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.

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