Industry News

SQL Server Magazine Presents Best of Show Awards

SQL Connections

SQL Server Magazine presented Best of Show awards to products in three categories—database design, database management, and database applications—at the spring SQL Connections conference in New Orleans. ER/Studio from Embarcadero Technologies won the Best of Show award in the database design category. SQL Probe from Subquery Innovations won the Best of Show award in the database management category. CAST e-Analyzer from CAST Software won the Best of Show award in the database application category.

Michael Otey, senior technical editor of SQL Server Magazine and Windows 2000 Magazine, judged the awards. Otey evaluated each product's capabilities, usability, and manageability during a round of demonstrations and informal interviews with SQL Connections exhibitors. "We looked at how effectively each product performs the task the developers intended, how easy the product's interface is to use and understand, and how easy the product is to implement and administer," Otey said. John Green, senior product reviewer for Windows 2000 Magazine, assisted Otey in his evaluations.

ER/Studio, the winner in the database design category, lets developers build logical and physical models for multiple databases, including SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2. The product also lets developers reverse-engineer existing databases and provides HTML-based reports that facilitate sharing and distributing database design information.

SQL Probe lets DBAs monitor the performance of multiple SQL Server systems. SQL Probe generates reports about the current state of SQL Server's internal statistics and the contents of internal structures, such as SQL Server's procedure cache. The product also captures baseline performance statistics and graphs performance changes over time.

CAST e-Analyzer analyzes information about an application's source code. "This can be very useful to the developer who needs to work with poorly documented or undocumented systems," Otey said. The product can read and analyze applications written in HTML, VBScript, JavaScript, ColdFusion Script, and other Web development languages.

SQL Server Magazine will present Best of Show awards again at the SQL Connections conference in October in Phoenix, Arizona.

—Michele Crockett

Tech-Ed 2000

SQL Server Magazine and sister publication Windows 2000 Magazine presented Best of Show awards to six products at the Microsoft Tech-Ed 2000 Conference in Orlando, Florida, in June. Judges selected two Best of Show winners each in the categories of SQL Server, Windows 2000, and Exchange Server, based on which products solved business needs in the most intuitive and elegant fashion.

Giganet won a SQL Server Best of Show award for its Clan Host Adapters and Cluster Switches server farm networking technologies, which use SQL Server 2000's Virtual Interface (VI) to give SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition plug-and-play multinode server clusters for scalability, reliability, and performance gains.

Knosys ProClarity won a Best of Show award in the SQL Server category for providing powerful yet easy-to-manipulate views into SQL Server OLAP Services data. ProClarity harnesses the power of OLAP by using a standard ActiveX component architecture that offers scalability and flexibility. Knosys also provides an extensive Application Developers Kit for creating custom analytical applications.

Best of Show winners in the Windows 2000 category were Heroix RoboER and NSI Software Double-Take GeoCluster for Windows 2000/NT. Winners in the Exchange Server category were Active Voice Corporation Unity 2.3 and Tacit Knowledge Systems Knowledge Mail.

—Paul Thurrott

SQL Server by the Bay PASS 2000 North America Coming to San Francisco

The Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) will host three days of intense all-SQL Server-all-the-time training and education at its PASS 2000 North America SQL Server users' conference, October 25 through 28, in San Francisco. User experts and the Microsoft development team will present more than 70 technical sessions within three tracks: data warehousing and data mining, developing Web-enabled and line-of-business solutions, and enterprise database administration and deployment. Microsoft's Paul Flessner, vice president of SQL Server, and Bill Baker, data warehouse product unit manager for SQL Server, will give keynote addresses. And attendees can try out new technologies in hands-on computer labs, pepper panels of Microsoft developers with SQL Server questions, check out SQL Server products at a two-day product expo, and take Microsoft Certification exams. PASS will also present three awards at the conference: the We Did it! team award (sponsored by SQL Server Magazine), the SurPASS award for individual achievement, and the PASS Student Scholarship. If three days isn't enough SQL Server education for you, you can register for one of three full-day, extra-charge preconference seminars: SQL Server Internals, presented by Kalen Delaney; advanced SQL Server Tips & Tricks, presented by Joe Celko; or ADO from Client/Server to the Web, presented by William Vaughn.

You can register for PASS 2000 North America and the preconference seminars at http://www.sqlpass.org/events/sanfrancisco/. Early-bird registration closes August 4, advance registration runs August 4 through September 13, and regular, full-price registration runs September 13 through October 28.

—SQL Server Magazine Staff