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Our news room includes recent product reviews, press releases, and external blogs about SQL Sentry software. Also
check out our team blogs for additional news.
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SQL Sentry Introduces Power Suite v7.2 at PASS Community Summit
The Power Suite continues its category dominance as the most complete monitoring solution with seamless history tracking and the lowest documented server overhead. The new features of v7.2 fall into three main categories: Query Plan Analysis, Windows Monitoring, and History/Alert Filtering. v7.2 includes two exciting new products: Performance Advisor for Windows and Event Manager for Windows.
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Nov 07, 2012 |
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SQL Sentry Launches Plan Explorer PRO
"SQL Sentry Plan Explorer PRO was developed in response to many users’ request for additional features and functionality that fall beyond the scope of a free too", said Greg Gonzalez, President and CEO, SQL Sentry. "Several of the features required significant development effort but they deliver the enhanced efficiency that busy SQL Server professionals require".
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Oct 30, 2012 |
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SQL Sentry Announces Kevin Kline as Director of Engineering Services
Kevin has been a Microsoft SQL Server MVP since 2004 and is a noted leader in the SQL Server industry. His product designs have won multiple "Best of TechEd" and "Readers' Choice" awards. He is a founding board member and former president of PASS. He has written or co-written eleven books including the best-selling SQL in a Nutshell. Kevin contributes monthly columns to SQL Server Pro and DBTA magazines. He is a noted trainer and thought leader on IT leadership skills, database management technology and practices, and SQL Server performance tuning and optimization. Kevin is also a top-rated speaker at conferences worldwide such as Microsoft TechEd, the PASS Summit, DevTeach, Oracle OpenWorld, and SQL Connections.
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Jul 16, 2012 |
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Product Review: SQL Sentry Power Suite 6.2 Earns 4.5 Out of 5 Stars!
"SQL Sentry Power Suite is feature rich and provides easy navigation between its integrated applications using a predictable console. I was impressed by how comprehensive it was and surprised at how useful it could be as a tool for ensuring good performance from the BI solutions that I design."
-- Brian Erlich, SQL Server Pro (Magazine)
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Dec. 15, 2011 |
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SQL Sentry Named as Winner of Multiple SQL Server Magazine Awards
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor, Event Manager and Plan Explorer are recognized with six awards from Penton Media’s SQL Server Magazine in the following categories: Best Database Monitoring and Performance Product, Best Database Management Product, and Best Free Tool.
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Nov 21, 2011 |
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Plan Explorer Demo by Paul Randal (SQLskills)
Paul Randal of SQLskills shows how to analyze what's using space in tempdb, and provides an overview of how to use SQL Sentry Plan Exporer in the investigation. Immerse yourself in SQL Server with the SQLskills Insider newsletter.
-- WMV | MOV
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Oct. 17, 2011 |
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Review of SQL Sentry’s Free Plan Explorer
Plan Explorer is so chock–full of features that it’s hard
to know where to start...Plan Explorer’s usability features are
efficient and easy to use.
-- Kevin Kline, Director of Technology for SQL Server Solutions at Quest Software
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Sep. 06, 2011 |
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Why I Went with SQL Sentry
"One of the greatest advantages you can have as a DBA is setting up a fully featured monitoring solution...Each one of these products (Performance Advisor, Event Manager, and Plan Explorer) on its own are great, but when you put them all together, it’s beyond awesome. It let’s you do more than just react to problems on your SQL Server, it let’s you get ahead of them."
-- Shannon Lowder, Database Engineer
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Aug. 30, 2011 |
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SQL Sentry talks with RunAs Radio about the Performance Challenges with Analysis Services
Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes with RunAs Radio, a weekly Internet Audio Talk Show for IT Professionals working with Microsoft products, speak with our own Steve Wright about the performance challenges with Analysis Services.
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Jul. 06, 2011 |
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An In-depth Analysis of SQL Sentry's Overhead
Aaron Bertrand publishes an analysis of the overhead that Performance Advisor and Event Manager place on both the server(s) being monitored and on the server(s) doing the monitoring.
-- Aaron Bertrand, Senior Consultant, SQL Sentry and SQL Server MVP
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Jul. 05, 2011 |
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SQL Sentry Partners with DBSophic:
"Power Suite + Qure Quick Start Pack" Announced
SQL Sentry and DBSophic, an innovative provider of performance management products for database-centric applications, announced a new product bundle to help SQL Server DBAs monitor, manage, troubleshoot and tune database server performance.
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Apr 07, 2011 |
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Five Favorite Free SQL Server Downloads
"SQL Sentry Plan Explorer opens execution plans and gives you much better visibility into the real problem...Once the bad plan is open in Plan Explorer, just right-click on it and the fun starts. When I’m tuning a server with slow IO, I can show the costs by IO only, not CPU – a big timesaver for me".
-- Brent Ozar, Founder/Owner, Brent Ozar PLF and SQL Server MVP
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Feb. 21, 2011 |
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The results are in: What Tech Companies Are Doing it Right?
Which SQL (or SQL-adjacent) tech companies are doing right, either by product, by promotions, or by people? ...in first place stands SQL Sentry, at 24% of the votes.
-- Community Poll at www.MidnightDBA.com
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Feb. 14, 2011 |
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Vendors Doing It Right: SQL Sentry
* They Know Me - Their product started out as a tool used internally by a hosting company...
* They Listen - They reach out to a network of MVPs and experienced SQL Server DBAs across verticals for feedback, beta testing and advice...
* They Don’t Hide - In their Performance Advisor tool they don’t filter out their own tool...
* Great Staff - From Greg Gonzalez, who runs the company and still loves taking SQL Immersion/Master training with Paul Randal...
* Supportive - Take suggestions, give great advice and not only know their product but know SQL Server...
* Great Tool - All of the above points are great but it helps that they make an incredibly useful tool...
* They Want You To Grow Too - Once you get to know some of the folks that run SQL Sentry you’ll realize that as much as they want to sell licenses they want to give back to the community...
-- Mike Walsh, StraightPath Solutions
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Feb. 11, 2011 |
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SQL Sentry Announces Exclusive Master Immersion Training Sponsorship
SQL Sentry announces their exclusive sponsorship of the first two SQLskills Master Immersion Training events. SQLskills.com, run by renowned experts Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp, is the premier provider of approved training for the SQL Server Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) exam, and has been deeply involved with the re-architecting of the overall MCM certification throughout 2010.
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Feb 08, 2011 |
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Making Use of Plan Explorer in my own Environment
"Today I had the opportunity to work with a vendor of mine on a performance problem and during the investigation of the problems, I identified a query that if rewritten a different way, without any index changes impact to the SQL Server was significantly lower. To show this to the vendor I got on a WebEx session and shared my desktop with the vendors developers and executed their original query and my rewritten version of the query to show that my version output the same result and had significantly less impact to the server than their original one did. They could see this in the execution times of the two queries, but to really drive the point home I did a copy/paste of the Actual Execution Plan XML from the SQL Batch that contained both statements in it to the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer for the vendor."
-- Jonathan Kehayias, Senior Consultant at SQLskills
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Feb. 2, 2011 |
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More Intuitive Tool for Reading SQL Server Execution Plans
"Anyone responsible for performance tuning or troubleshooting should be familiar with the graphical execution plan feature of SQL Server Management Studio. This allows you to visually display the execution plan for a particular query (or multiple plans in a batch). There are weaknesses in this feature, however...SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a no-risk, no-strings-attached alternative to the graphical plans we've been saddled with for the last decade."
-- MSSQLTips.com, Aaron Bertrand, SQL Server MVP
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Nov. 24, 2010 |
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FREE SQL Sentry Plan Explorer Launched at PASS Summit 2010
SQL Sentry announces the availability of SQL Sentry Plan Explorer - a FREE software tool that greatly improves how you work with SQL Server Query plans. Plan Explorer builds upon the graphical plan view in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to make query plan analysis more efficient. It contains many of the plan analysis features being introduced in SQL Sentry v6, but it does not require a collection service or database.
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Nov 09, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry Performance Advisor Named "Best of Connections 2010" By DevConnections
"We are honored to have Performance Advisor recognized as the 'Best SQL Server Product' by DevConnections," said Greg Gonzalez, President and CEO of SQL Sentry. "Since the product was first introduced in 2008, we've continued to release new product capabilities with the goal of providing the best performance tool for Microsoft SQL Server."
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Nov 08, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry Announces Aaron Bertrand as Senior Consultant
We're proud to announce that Aaron Bertrand has joined the SQL Sentry team as Senior Consultant. Honored by Microsoft as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) since 1997, Aaron has over 10 years of technical experience with Microsoft SQL Server. His responsibilities include development of SQL Sentry consulting services; interacting with clients; and driving new product initiatives.
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Oct 28, 2010 |
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Which SQL Server Tools?
"I use SQL Sentry for a few things:
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To quickly see performance alerts/issues (Performance Advisor)
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To view the status of all jobs, report server reports, maintenance plans, etc. in the calendar view (Event Manager)
- To help prioritize which servers need my help the fastest (If the trending in the PA dashboard looks bad, or I see a lot of errors/TOP SQL/Blocking SQL in the calendar the instance gets prioritized)
- I get lonely – I like the servers to talk to me and tell me how they are doing. If a job takes longer than it has every other execution or less time than normal there may be an issue and I want to know. I want to know (at first anyway) about everytime long blocks happen or queries over an hour. I want to know when a job fails. The tool does that."
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Mike Walsh, StraightPath Solutions
"I can’t live without: SQL Sentry Performance Advisor / Event Manager."
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SQLBlog.com, Aaron Bertrand, SQL Server MVP
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Jul. 16, 2010 |
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SSMS : Which parts do you love? Which parts do you hate?
"I get more complete and consumable information, and more immediately, from SQL Sentry's Event Manager - which also has the ability to store more history in the repository without bogging down production instances of msdb... If I want a good look at what is going on in my server, I will use SQL Sentry's Performance Advisor - which does a great job of warning me about issues even when I'm not paying attention."
-- SQLBlog.com, Aaron Bertrand, SQL Server MVP
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Jun. 22, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry Truth-Telling and Disk Configuration
"When I took over as DBA, I inherited a SQL 2000 server with about 30 databases on it supporting our main systems, and a SQL 2005 server with multiple instances...Then one day, I’m poking around inside SQL Sentry Performance Advisor...I was stunned...Here was something that I thought was such a basic truth that was turned upside down."
-- Mark Caldwell, Professional IT Solution Provider
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Jun. 01, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry Announces SQLCruise Sponsorship and Contest
Winner Receives Free Four Day Cruise and SQL Server Technical Training
"The SQLCruise 2010 is a unique opportunity to receive technical training from noted SQL Server experts in a comfortable, refreshing environment. A small group of students, exploring in-depth advanced technical topics and closely interacting with their instructors, all while enjoying the world-class accommodations of the Carnival Imagination, what could be better," said Tim Ford, Microsoft SQL Server MVP and SQLCruise Trainer. "We are thrilled to have the support of SQL Sentry as their first-class products and their knowledgeable staff make a valuable difference in the SQL Server community every day."
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May 17, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry First Impressions
"After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate...Great Support...Chaining and Queueing...Calendar View...Performance Advisor Dashboard History View...Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name...The combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan."
-- Mark Caldwell, Professional IT Solution Provider
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May 11, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry 5.5 And Letting Reports Save You
"I downloaded their (SQL Sentry's) new version 5.5 when it was in Beta and I have loved their reports, even saved my bacon a couple of times... As fun as it is when first starting out to build your own reports and monitoring processes, there is something nice about having everything you need a few clicks away."
-- Mike Walsh, StraightPath Solutions
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Apr. 13, 2010 |
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Performance Advisor for Analysis Services...is hands down the best SSAS monitoring tool available
"Well, as with most things in SSAS, its not AS EASY when compared to the server's relational sibling. I begin with the easiest approach: tools. There are a few available tools that one can use to view and manage SSAS activity. First and foremost is that of SQLSentry's Performance Advisor for Analysis Services. This tool is hands down the best SSAS monitoring tool available. SQLSentry clearly filled a large void in the SSAS world."
-- Derek Comingore, SQL Server MVP, B.I. Voyage
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Feb. 14, 2010 |
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SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for Analysis Services Named
2009 Editors’ Best Award Winner by SQL Server Magazine
"We are honored to have Performance Advisor for Analysis Services recognized so quickly by the editorial experts of these industry leading publications," said Greg Gonzalez, President and CEO of SQL Sentry. "Since the launch of this product less than six months ago, we’ve received many accolades from customers and industry experts for delivering new capabilities to manage and tune Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services."
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Nov. 24, 2009 |
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SQL Sentry Announces Performance Optimization Software
for SQL Server Analysis Services
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for Analysis Services provides unparalleled insight into Analysis Services performance, including bottlenecks related to memory and storage systems, aggregation usage, unoptimized queries, and query and processing tasks competing for the same resources. And when combined with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for SQL Server and Event Manager, provides the only solution in the market covering Microsoft’s entire BI platform, including the relational data warehouse (SQL Server), Analysis Services (SSAS), Integration Services (SSIS), and Reporting Services (SSRS).
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Jul. 14, 2009 |
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SQL Sentry Introduces First Analysis Services Monitoring Solution
"I’m currently in Germany at the PASS European Conference....for the last few months I’ve also been talking to the guys at SQL Sentry – who are also here exhibiting – about their new product called Performance Advisor for Analysis Services which has just been made public. I’ve had an in-depth demo and my first impression is that this is the first Analysis Services monitoring solution that I would actually want to use; it looks really, really good. I believe SQL Sentry has the first solution that will monitor the SQL Server relational engine, Analysis Services, SSIS and SSRS as well."
-- Chris Webb, IT Consultant, UK
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Apr. 24, 2009 |
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Monitoring Your Servers: Data Collection vs. Performance Advisor
"In SQL Server 2008 we get Data Collection, a built-in framework for collecting and analyzing performance and other metrics from multiple servers...I thought it would be useful to compare some of the features with a 3rd party tool that I use in my environment, Performance Advisor from SQL Sentry....Performance Advisor goes above and beyond in the disk usage report category, providing disk capacity statistics like Data Collection does, and adding real-time disk activity views that show exactly where the I/Os are coming and going."
-- Aaron Bertrand, SQL Server MVP
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Mar. 19, 2009 |
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Are You Using Your 3rd Party Tools?
"There are a number of reasons why I like Performance Advisor, the cool dashboard, the ease of being able to see the history and change back to what is going on right now,
and the ability to see if you have a bottle neck on your disk drives. I thought that I knew all there was to know about the tool. Then I discovered
the Quick Trace...I have to admit that Quick Trace is now my favorite part of Performance Advisor."
-- SQLonCall, Chris Shaw
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Jan. 12, 2009 |
See the News Room Archive for previous articles, press releases, and product reviews.
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