Ovation Research Group

We've just completed the May 2006 issue of the SQL Server Standard, and once again we've got a special issue. Just like last year we focused one issue completely on a company and their development team. I'm proud to announce the May issue focuses on the Ovation Research Group, a pharmeceutical research and consulting firm.

The Ovation team is led by Richard Pless and he's helped put together a great issue with some very interesting articles on not only how Ovation uses SQL Server, but on up to the minute SQL Server 2005 topics! Included in this issue are:

• Creating a data dictionary in SQL Server 2005
• Monitoring Your SQL Server Performance with Reporting Services
• When LIKE Isn’t Enough: Learning to Love Regular Expressions
• and more!

You can also read the editorial below:

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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

If you are interested in seeing your company and team in print and have a team willing to contribute, send a note to me (sjones@sqlservercentral.com).