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Microsoft has unveiled more details of project “Atlanta”, a cloud-based configuration assessment service aimed at Microsoft SQL Server deployments.
The company released a beta version of the service this week during the PASS Summit 2010 conference in Seattle. It was just one of several announcements the company made during the four-day event, where Microsoft released a community technology preview of the next generation of SQL Server.
According to Robert Reynolds, director of System Center Product Planning at Microsoft, the plan is for the production version of Atlanta to be available in the first half of next year. The goal of the service is to analyze SQL Server deployments to help database administrators avoid problems such as unpatched databases and potential data loss issues, he told eWEEK.
“Included within each alert is guidance to help customers rectify any incident that will include actionable steps, self-help, and/or assisted help; however Microsoft [is] not building auto-remediation into Atlanta,” he said. “This makes sense, as not all issues would be resolved by a simple patch deployment.”
The beta 1 release of Atlanta will support configuration monitoring of the SQL Engine within SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 deployments running on Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2. In addition, Microsoft stated it is investigating the opportunity to extend the capabilities of Atlanta to monitor configurations of other versions as well.
The company did not reveal pricing or licensing plans.
“This secure cloud service assesses the configuration of SQL Server deployments helping enable DBAs (database administrators) to proactively avoid configuration problems,” according to the SQL Server Team blog. “Additionally, Atlanta will provide best practice guidance and help customers to more rapidly resolve identified issues through step-by step-guidance and the ability for Microsoft support professionals to access the most up-to-date configuration data for their deployment.”