Microsoft To Offer Best Practices Tool For SQL Server

Microsoft will soon offer a new tool to compile best practices for SQL Server deployment. The Best Practices Analyzer, now available in beta form from the Microsoft site, aims to help database administrators and developers create more easily maintained and managed applications.

Microsoft announced the free tool in mid-November at the annual Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Community Summit in Seattle. It is available on Microsoft's Web site.

Also at the show, Microsoft continued to beat the drum about new management talents and new and more scalable extract, transform and reload (ETL) capabilities to come in Yukon, the next-generation SQL Server due late next year.

ETL, or what Microsoft dubs Data Transformation Services, was also a big push at the Professional Developers Conference last month in Los Angeles. (See story.)

At PASS, the company showed off a new checkpoint re-start feature that could be a big time saver. "If a customer is moving millions of rows inside of DTS and there's an error not handled correctly, DTS now stops sending the rows and restarts at row number one. With this feature, if an error occurs, DTS restarts right where the problem occurred," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server.Microsoft has bundled DTS capabilities with the database since the SQL Server 7 release but has rewritten and expanded those capabilities to make Yukon more suitable for enterprises. Microsoftalso promised tighter links between integral DTS and Yukon's Reporting Services and Web Services. SQL Server Vice President Gordon Mangione hit on these notes at his PASS keynote Wednesday.

With the delayed Yukon release, Microsoft hopes to allay any doubts that SQL Server is not yet scalable or reliable enough for use in the biggest of big enterprises. Microsoft faces entrenched, and capable, competition from Oracle databases in those accounts, observers say.