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[Focus]

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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...
 — Editors

Dell Claims Best Hardware Award
Readers' Choice voters overwhelmingly named Dell best in hardware, citing the company's great prices, Web site, and quality.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Scot J. Reagin

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.
 — Morris Lewis

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.
 — Editors

Readers Passionate About Favorite Development Tools
See what products readers voted as their favorites in SQL Server development.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

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.
 — Editors

Winning Products Secure Databases and Applications
Winning products in our Readers' Choice Awards for security.
 — Editors

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[Features]

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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.
 — Rick Dobson

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[SQL Server Savvy]

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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.
 — Brian Moran

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[Editorial]

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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.
 — Michael Otey

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[Inside SQL Server]

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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.
 — Kalen Delaney

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[New Products]

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New Products, September 2004
Check out the latest SQL Server-related new and improved products.
 — Dawn Cyr

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[SELECT TOP(X)]

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T-SQL's Datetime Data Type
Michael Otey answers six commonly asked questions about the SQL Server datetime data type.
 — Michael Otey

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[Lessons from the Field]

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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.
 — Tom Davidson , et al.

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[Ask Microsoft]

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Deleting an IDENTITY Column
Gert Drapers of Microsoft's SQL Server development team describes how to delete an IDENTITY column.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team

Differential Backups
Richard Waymire of Microsoft's SQL Server development team clarifies when to use differential backups.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team

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.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team

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.
 — Microsoft's SQL Server Development Team