ServiceU helps organizations ranging in size from small churches to Fortune 500 companies operate concerts, conferences, and other events with its online event management software, including ticket sales, event registration, and facility and resource scheduling. The company needed to ensure high availability of its services, and increase its scalability to keep up with its rapid growth. The company upgraded its database to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition Service Pack 1. The company uses the Database Mirroring feature of SQL Server 2005 to mirror its data at a geographically separate disaster recovery datacenter to help ensure high availability. ServiceU has reduced the need for scheduled downtime through use of SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing. Scalability has been enhanced as the move to SQL Server 2005 has helped reduce CPU utilization.

Dimension Data has operations in 36 countries as it provides IT services to a global customer base that includes 125 of the U.S. Fortune 500 and 32 of the top 100 listed companies in the UK. The company, which generated 2006 revenue of U.S.$3.1 billion, initially deployed its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning solution using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 database. It upgraded to SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition running on Intel® Xeon® processor based servers to gain the high availability benefits of SQL Server 2005 Database Mirroring, which creates a continually updated copy of data to a separate server for disaster recovery. The company is using the SQL Server 2005 Database Snapshot feature to create a dedicated copy of the database for reporting so that queries aren’t run against the production servers. The Online Indexing feature reduces the need for scheduled downtime.

Gomez helps some of the biggest companies on the Web provide a better online experience with its ExperienceFirst Network™, which includes 70 remote sites strategically positioned around the globe to monitor Web traffic and to test the user experience. Gomez, which has a 2.7 terabyte database with more than 7 billion rows of data in its largest table, needed a more efficient way to accomplish its daily deletes of some 280 million rows of data. The company upgraded its database infrastructure to Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition, using the Table Partitioning feature to create day-by-day partitions for automated aged-data deletion, and Online Indexing to reduce fragmentation. The Table Partitioning feature of SQL Server 2005 enables Gomez to perform daily deletions in seconds that used to require several hours—enhancing the user experience while giving new life to existing resources. Using SQL Server 2005 Online Indexing to defragment tables has boosted performance.

The reservation system is at the core of an airline’s operations. Navitaire serves some 50 airlines around the globe with its reservation system, including industry leaders such as AirTran Airways, Jetstar, and Ryanair. When Navitaire’s existing reservation system, was approaching the limits of its processing capabilities for some of its largest customers, a change was needed. Navitaire upgraded to a solution using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit) running on Intel-based 8-CPU 64-bit database servers. To address this need, the company developed a new reservation system, using Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework. The solution gave Navitaire the scalability it required, enhanced performance, and simplified database management.