Arindam Sen, a DBA with American Power Conversion in West Kingston, Rhode Island, won top honors in the 2004 SQL Server Magazine Innovator Awards, presented Monday at the SQL Server Magazine Connections Conference in Las Vegas. The awards program, sponsored by Idera, also recognized three runners-up and eight honorable mentions. Serving as judges for the awards were SQL Server Magazine contributing editors Douglas McDowell of Intellinet and Brian Moran of Solid Quality Learning and Stephen Wynkoop of the SQL Server Worldwide User's Group (SSWUG).
“Three years ago, SQL Server Magazine launched the Innovator Awards to recognize the most creative and effective uses of SQL Server technology to solve business problems--and to share those solutions with the community,” noted SQL Server Magazine Editor Kathy Blomstrom. “This year, we received perhaps the highest quality of entries ever. We are inspired by the work you’re doing to make IT a vital part of your organizations’ success.”
Sen, as the grand-prize winner, received a trophy and an all-expenses-paid trip to the conference for his high-availability monitoring, alerting, and reporting system. He increased systems availability, boosted revenue, improved the end-user experience, satisfied Sarbanes-Oxley auditors, and polished the image of the SQL Server/Windows platform with a centralized monitoring/alerting tool that monitors all tiers of the Web and CRM infrastructure—including hardware load balancers, Web servers, the OS, and the database server. Judges commended the solution--which used T-SQL, Visual Studio .NET, Data Transformation Services (DTS), and Reporting Services--as significant and creative.
Michael Rhodes, senior technical architect with Teksouth in Gardendale, Alabama, was named first runner-up for an advanced military decision-support system (DSS). A large government agency DSS system evaluates, scrubs, relates, and publishes data in near realtime 24x7 from 19 different systems and 450 locations worldwide--publishing gigabytes of data per day, making terabytes of data available for ad hoc queries, and returning results in seconds. Judges noted the solution’s creative use of SQL Server 2000 scale-out technology and distributed queries and the huge impact on users, calling the solution “innovative and technically challenging.”
Zewei Song, application developer with World Publishing Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and formerly with e-Money Systems, was second runner-up, winning for a seamless database server-side encryption solution. Song used .NET and T-SQL extended stored procedures to build an encryption system that strengthens customer privacy and data protection with minimum performance impact.
Mike Smith, data warehouse developer with Cendian Corporation in Atlanta, took third runner-up honors, winning with a high-performance extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) summary solution that cut business intelligence (BI) table-load times in half, slashed table-reload times from hours to minutes, and used prebuilt results to draw more users to the BI system.
Winning honorable mention recognition in this year’s awards program were
- Mark Abrams, programmer/analyst with NWNA in Greenwich, Connecticut, for a set of stored procedures that handle errors, logging, emailing on errors, and transaction management and that developers can plug into any database.
- Steven Berringer, data-tier architect with Parker Hannifin in Orange, California, for a capacity-planning solution that uses Performance Monitor Counter Logs, IIS, XML, and Windows Task Scheduler to build a performance baseline for the company’s SQL Servers.
- Thomas Godovits and Michael Meier of Osterreichische Kontrollbank AG in Vienna, Austria, for a realtime liquidity-management analysis solution that uses DTS to load SAP data from Oracle 9i into a SQL Server Analysis Services OLAP database and uses MIS Plain for ad hoc and standard reporting and planning and forecasting.
- Jim Leddy, systems analyst with Unisys in Plymouth, Michigan, for a tool that loops through the output of usp_Scheduled_Jobs (a stored procedure from the SQL Server Magazine Reader to Reader tip by Jose L. Amado-Blanco and Jason Carter, “Job Schedule Report,” November 2000, http://www.winnetmag.com/SQLServer/Article/ArticleID/15560/15560.html) and explodes a list of SQL Agent jobs to help balance jobs and build maintenance time into the job schedule.
- Yoel Martinez, a database administrator and developer for CITCO Technology Management in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for a WAN log-shipping implementation that uses Imceda SQL LiteSpeed to compress backups, optimize bandwidth usage, and encrypt the backups for security.
- Paul Munkenbeck, now a three-time winner in the Innovator Awards and senior database consultant with Maritz, Ltd., in Marlow, the U.K., for an EBCDIC-to-Unicode conversion system that uses the Windows API function WideCharToMultiByte in a C++ extended stored procedure called from a user-defined scalar function.
- Narcissa Ramich, technical specialist with Pershing Limited in London, for a custom replication solution that reconciles the data between mainframe, staging, and user databases that comprise an Internet-based broker system.
- Danny Santee, senior DBA with the City of Aurora, Colorado, for his DTS-based ETL solution that loads data from an Informix database into a SQL Server data warehouse.
All winners received a discount to the SQL Server Magazine Connections Conference and a 1-year subscription to SQL Server Magazine.
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