Sunday, July 5, 2009

Sign Up for the SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP




SQL Server 2008 R2 expands on the value delivered in SQL Server 2008 by providing a wealth of new features and capabilities that can benefit your entire organization. This release will further improve IT Efficiency with new and enhanced management capabilities and empower business users to access, integrate, analyze and share information using business intelligence tools they already know.


What's New in R2

With this new release, IT professionals, developers and business users will experience the following benefits:

Capitalize on Hardware Innovation

Increase in the number of logical processors supported from 64 up to 256.  This will provide customers with more choices for obtaining single system scalability with high performance.

Optimize Hardware Resources

Dashboard viewpoints provide insight into utilization and policy violations to help identify consolidation opportunities, maximize investments and maintain healthy systems.

Manage Efficiently at Scale

Through new extensions in SQL Server Management Studio, organizations will gain insights into their growing applications and databases and help ensure higher service levels through policies and dashboard viewpoints.

Enhance Collaboration Across Development and IT

Streamline Application Lifecycle Management through integration with Visual Studio. A new project type enables a single unit of management for packaging database schema with application requirements. This ensures higher quality application development while also accelerating deployments, moves, and changes over time.

Improve the Quality of Your Data

Centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data can ensure reporting consistency across systems and deliver faster more accurate results across the enterprise.

Manage User-Generated Analytical Applications

Comprehensive management thru Microsoft SharePoint gives IT the ability to manage and secure all BI assets, thus freeing the original authors to focus on the priorities of the business.

Report with Ease

Decrease time and costs developing reports by giving users the ability to design their own queries, reports and charts through powerful and intuitive authoring and ad hoc reporting capabilities.

Get More Out of Your Data

New support for geospatial visualization can produce new insights and discoveries when geospatial data is combined with corporate data for reporting and analysis.

Build Robust Analytical Applications

With the in-memory analytics add-in for Microsoft Excel 2010, business users can quickly access, analyze and summarize vast amounts of data directly in Excel without the assistance of the IT department.

Consolidate Your Data

New “data mash up” capabilities will simplify time consuming data gathering and consolidation tasks.  Integrate data from multiple sources, including corporate databases and external sources, using powerful tools within Microsoft Excel.

Share and Collaborate with Confidence

New collaboration tools make it easy to share analytic applications and reports through Microsoft Office SharePoint, where they are refreshed automatically, maintained, and made accessible to others.

During the summer of 2009, Microsoft will offer a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2. Sign up now to receive an e-mail notification of the availability of the CTP.

Register for Notification of SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP


Sunday, June 28, 2009

Create and Modify Reports Using the Report Builder Tool

This video shows us how to use SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence Studio to create a report model. We then use the report model and the Report Builder tool to create a report. The report is saved to the SQL Server Reporting Services reporting site where it can later be run or modified by other users who want a slightly different report.

Length: 20 Minutes 41 seconds

Create a Report with Visual Studio 2008 and Deploy it to SQL Server Reporting Services 2008

This video shows how to build a report using Visual Studio 2008 and then deploy it to SQL Server Reporting Services.

This demo shows how to:

Create report project in Visual Studio
Create an shared data sources
How to design a report
How to add interactive sorting
Change the project settings to deploy the report
Deploy the report
Run the report in SSRS

Length: 9 Minutes 7 seconds


Enable Transparent Data Encryption

This video shows how to use the transparent data encryption (TDE) feature of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition. In addition to showing how to create the keys and certificates necessary to enable TDE, the AdventureWorks sample database is encrypted. After encrypting the database, the effect encryption has on your server is dicussed and what happens with database restores when the proper keys are not available is demonstrated.

Length: 19 Minutes 41 seconds

Using the Database Engine Tuning Advisor

Ensure top performance by using the Database Engine Tuning Advisor the database any workload can be analyzed for changes to the database that will increase performance. By taking advantage of the database engine tuning advisor, administrators can reduce the amount of time they spend analyzing the database to increase performance. Watch this video and know how to use a SQL script as the input to the database engine tuning advisor to determine how to increase performance in certain tables in the Adventureworks sample database.


Length: 13 Minutes 42 seconds

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Setting up a Maintenance Plan to Backup Databases

Create database maintenance plans using the Maintenance Plan wizard and SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). This video also shows you how to customize plans that were created with the wizard.

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Length: 14 Minutes 29 seconds