The May issue of the SQL Server Standard magazine was a touch late and should be arriving on most of your doorstpes now. It is also available as a PDF download for those subscribers in their Virtual Briefcase. This month we look at another company, taking the content of the issue from the Ovation Research Group and their work with SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000. The editorial below is available for those that want to see what's inside. The magazine should be available shortly on the PASS site as well as the MCP Special Offers page.

If you aren't a subscriber, PASS member, or MCP, you can purchase the PDF of this single issue for $3.99 in our store.

We hope you enjoy it and please feel free to send us some feedback on what you think (webmaster@sqlservercentral.com).

In This Issue

• Editorial : A Regulated World
• Life in a Growing Pharmaceutical Company
• Automating Database Documentation Using Information Schemas and System Tables
• Reporting Multi-valued Attributes from the Active Directory with SQL Server Reporting Services
• Monitoring Your SQL Server on the Cheap with SQL Server Reporting Services
• CLR Made CLeaR
• When LIKE Isn’t Enough: Learning to Love Regular Expressions
• Implementing Audit History Logs (AKA Audit Logs) in SQL Server
• Using XML for Analysis With SQL 2005 Analysis Services Part 2

Editorial : A Regulated Life

Last year, in March of 2005, the focus of the entire SQL Server Standard issue was on the Hancock Information Group, a business-to-business sales and marketing firm and the employer of my partner, Andy Warren. It had been his idea in late 2004 that we profile one company and how SQL Server was used in that company. We got lucky in that a few of his developers had written articles before and were eager to contribute, so we spent quite a few months having them take a look at the different ways in which they used SQL Server.

That issue was quite popular, and in the summer of 2005 I was contacted by Richard Pless of the Ovation Research Group, a research and consulting firm for the pharmaceutical and health-care industries. They had enjoyed the articles and were interested in having their company profiled in 2006.

After a few email and phone conversations, we embarked upon the journey of once again profiling how SQL Server is used at one company. This year we are bringing you fewer, but longer and more detailed articles on SQL Server, and I think the result is more interesting.

SQL Server 2005 will really change the way that SQL Server fits into many companies. Ovation is already looking at implementing a number of features, and some of our articles reflect that. We take a look at the CLR and its usefulness in creating functions and then build on that with a second article examining regular expressions called from SQL Server. We take a look at the meta data you can get from SQL Server 2005, which is incredibly extensive and useful. There’s also a very interesting Active Directory/SQL Server integration to show data in Reporting Services for getting security information out to the IT group in real time.

Since Ovation works with quite a few pharmaceutical firms, they fall under some regulations from the US government. This means security, privacy, and auditing are important parts of all their work. We take a look at auditing in general, and specifically in practice, from the point of view of a firm that is required to get it right.

Lastly, with performance always on the mind of a DBA, we have a fantastic article that looks at tracking performance over time. It is a great way for server monitoring on a budget and should help you justify that 64-bit, 256GB of RAM, SQL Server 2005 server for the next budget cycle.

We hope you enjoy this issue and our plan is to try and publish one of these a year, bringing you an in-depth look at one company and the innovative ways in which they use SQL Server in the real world. And the articles are written by the people that actually use SQL Server in their daily job.

Steve Jones