Today’s topics include T-Mobile launching narrowband IoT communications nationwide, and Microsoft releasing SQL Operations Studio for job management.
As part of its run-up to nationwide 5G communications, T-Mobile has launched narrowband IoT, a series of bands intended specifically for sensors and other devices that communicate only small amounts of data at any one time, but which need a dedicated band in which to do it.
T-Mobile has utilized the guard bands, which are narrow slices of frequencies next to their LTE bands used for cellular communications, as a way to achieve spectrum efficiency.
Balaji Sridharan, T-Mobile’s vice president of IoT and M2M, said Qualcomm and others are already making the modems, modules and chips for narrowband IoT, and device makers are starting the process of getting them certified by the FCC.
He expects most of the band use will be by things like environmental sensors and asset tracking devices, although many other devices could also use the T-Mobile network.
Microsoft has released a new version of SQL Operations Studio, which is a free, cross-platform database management tool that works with Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse.
In addition to listing active SQL Server Agent jobs, the tool can be used to view alerts, operators and proxies, according to Alan Yu, a program manager at Microsoft SQL Server.
The main Jobs view now features a new visualization for quickly locating jobs, and, following up on the June 2018 beta release of the SQL Server Profiler extension for SQL Operations Studio, Microsoft’s developers have added new keyboard shortcuts and options to help users set up their monitoring environments faster. Also included is the Combine Scripts script-management extension from Cobus Kruger.