Wednesday, October 7, 2009

SQL Server in Business Today

SQL Server has made huge inroads into the business market since its inception.The real advances have come since SQL Server 6.5. A huge number of applications in the marketplace have been written to utilize the advantages of SQL Server.A few categories of these systems are as follows:

?Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software— A number of CRM packages on the market have been designed to take advantage of SQL Server in combination with other Microsoft products such as Exchange and Outlook. CRM products track customer information and all contact that has been made with the customers.

? Data Collection Systems— These applications are designed to capture realtime information and store it away for later processing and summarization.These systems usually require extremely high availability and reliability. To produce these types of results, SQL Server Enterprise Edition used with Windows NT Enterprise Edition in a clustered environment provides a platform with built-in redundancy and support for automatic failover.

?Data Warehouses— A data warehouse stores a large collection of data that can be analyzed for trends that are useful to the company that owns the data.For example, a simple data warehouse could show a company's inventory manager how a specific product has sold during a specific week over the past few years so that when the week in question rolls around, enough of that product is on hand to meet the projected need.Data warehouses were all the rage a few years ago. Support for data
warehouses dwindled because of the large investment it took to create them and their immense size. Smaller data warehouses, known as data marts, have lately begun to reemerge to provide this important information to companies that choose to implement them. SQL Server is a great choice for these types of applications because of built-in OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)support.

? E-Commerce— The surge in popularity of the Internet over the past few years has brought about a new way for companies to buy and sell products.Many companies have chosen SQL Server as the platform they base their ecommerce engines on because of its stability, high availability, and low cost.

No comments: