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Today at the 2003 Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Community Summit -- Seattle, Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) unveiled details about upcoming tools that will increase database administration productivity. In the opening keynote address, Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president for SQL Server(TM) at Microsoft, highlighted the significant advancements that will be made to Microsoft's extract, transform and load (ETL) technology, known as Data Transformation Services (DTS), in the next version of Microsoft(R) SQL Server, code-named "Yukon." In addition, he announced the availability of the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for SQL Server 2000, a tool designed to help database administrators (DBAs) develop better, more maintainable SQL Server applications and avoid common errors in managing SQL Server installations. Also during his keynote address, Mangione highlighted that Microsoft SQL Server, part of the Microsoft Windows Server System(TM), had been identified as one of the world's largest and most heavily used databases by Winter Corporation, a leading center of expertise in database scalability for enterprise applications and business intelligence (BI). More than 20 SQL Server customers were included on four TopTen lists in the survey, which means customers on the lists chose SQL Server more than any other Windows-based database provider. Moreover, two winners were in the "All Environments" category, which includes the largest databases in the world. This recognition provides independent validation that SQL Server meets the demands of enterprise-class scalability. "Winter Corp.'s survey proves that SQL Server exceeds the demands of large, enterprise-scale businesses," Mangione said. "The customers included in this survey store multiple terabytes of data and rely on SQL Server. Not only do they get the scalability they need, but it comes at a much lower cost than with other systems." "Yukon" to Deliver Enterprise-Level, Out-of-the-Box ETL Capabilities In SQL Server "Yukon," users will see a complete redesign of the DTS architecture, which will provide developers and DBAs with enterprise-level ETL capabilities out of the box. The new DTS architecture enables scalable, manageable and reliable ETL with remarkable ease of use and performance. Features such as graphical debugging, and built-in transformations such as fuzzy lookup, will allow developers and DBAs to easily develop enterprise-class applications. The DTS architecture not only enables great performance and scale, but also provides transaction support, restartability, data error handling and data cleansing. The new DTS will enable DBAs to readily build data movement and ETL solutions that are inherently reliable. "According to industry analysts, 70 to 80 percent of the costs to implement BI is from data integration," said Bill Baker, general manager for SQL Server business intelligence at Microsoft. "The out-of-the-box capabilities available with Microsoft's DTS capabilities enable customers to quickly and easily build ETL solutions at a fraction of the cost of what is available in the market today. With this technology, customers can get more from their data at a much lower total cost of ownership." DTS has tight integration with Analysis Services, Reporting Services and Web Services -- metadata sharing gives a more complete design time experience, and at runtime this close integration powers end-to-end business intelligence. A comprehensive API for developers means that DTS can be extended with custom data sources, transformations, workflow tasks and other objects, all of which take advantage of fundamental DTS abilities, such as debugging, error handling, restart and event handlers. Even better, these APIs can be used from native code for optimal performance, or from managed code for the simplicity, security and other advantages of Microsoft .NET. Best Practices Analyzer: The Shortest Path to More Manageable SQL Server Applications The Best Practices Analyzer for SQL Server 2000 is a noninvasive, extensible tool that compiles best practices and recommendations from the development team and SQL Server users. The tool is designed to help DBAs and developers build better, more maintainable SQL Server applications and avoid oversights in managing SQL Server installations. The best practices cover the usage and administration aspects of SQL Server databases. The configuration recommendations range from availability and backup/recover to management and performance. In addition, the BPA can scan for configurations that use deprecated features, which helps DBAs plan for future uses of the system. The BPA beta release is available today for download at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/ .