Back in January I offered a promotion as a way of introducing our maintenance/operations auditing services. Now I've completed a bunch of them, with some excellent results for customers.

One international customer, Plex Systems, was so pleased with the outcome of my audit of their manufacturing ERP software hosting databases that they issued a press release today to their industry partners and clients. Another customer, Hose and Fittings, Etc, was amazed at the details and justifications in the report I presented them - see their testimonial on the Past Customers page.

Take a look at the new auditing page that describes how the various audits work, and let me know if you want to discuss doing one - we can do it wherever you are in the world.

Thanks!

Okay, this post is describing some new services we provide (we are a consulting firm after all :-), but there's a promotion at the bottom where you can save $$$ on one of the new services.

We're starting to offer a set of standalone auditing services that we can perform remotely, greatly reducing the cost of having someone come on-site to evaluate your SQL Server environment. The new standalone audit services we are providing are:

• Database maintenance and operations audit of your SQL Server environment
• Disaster recovery and high-availability audit of your SQL Server environment

The remote audits take the form of us giving you some non-intrusive scripts to run on each server, plus a detailed questionnaire to fill in. We analyze the results and send you a list of recommendations, with supporting explanations and links to deeper information.

As part of a regular remote consulting engagement, we'd also be engaging with the DBA team through web-meetings, phone calls, email conversations to undertake performance tuning, design work, and so on. However, many people just want to buy a small, limited block of time to run a quick audit and get the OK or a set of changes to implement to improve operations - this is where the standalone audits come in.

The standalone audit services we offer take a much shorter time (depending on environment size) than a regular consulting engagement, as they don't involve web-meetings and in-depth interaction with the DBA team, so they're a lot more cost-effective when on a tight budget. Of course, we also provide remote performance tuning, available in small blocks of time rather than an open-ended engagement, and the traditional 'figure out all sorts of problems' consulting engagements.

These audits are usually billed at our regular offsite consulting rate, but as an initial promotion I'll perform a database maintenance audit for $500 to the first 10 new customers who sign up before the end of January, limited to 4 hours of my time (a 50% saving over our regular rates).

Shoot me an email (through the contact button at the top of the page) if you're interested in any of these services and/or want to be one of the lucky few to take part in the promotion.

We look forward to working with you!

One set of features i haven't blogged about yet in SQL Server 2008 are the new security features: SQL Server Audit, Transparent Data Encryption, and Extensible Key Management. I've just finished writing a security article for the May 2009 TechNet Magazine (the annual security issue) and while trolling around TechNet I found that the security team has just published a comprehensive whitepaper on SQL Server Audit.

The whitepaper covers:

• Functional overview of the feature
• Technical overview of using the feature, including how to define the different levels of audit specification (database and server)
• Audit files and the event log
• Performance considerations (it's designed to be much faster than other auditing features are is uses the high-peformance extended events feature under the covers)
• Examples of using it, both through T-SQL and SSMS

Check it out at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd392015.aspx.