Microsoft Gold-Certified Consultants

Microsoft SQL Server 2019 is a modern, self-hosted version of Microsoft's flagship database platform. The marquee feature is the integration of SQL Server with Apache Spark, HDFS, and other Linux-based big data components to support Big Data Clusters. The Big Data Cluster enables data-intensive AI operations on the high-volume data resident in HDFS and Microsoft SQL Server 2019 storage pools. You can implement Big Data Clusters as containers in on-premises Kubernetes clusters, such as AKS on Azure Stack, or in any cloud with a managed Kubernetes service such as Microsoft Azure AKS.

SQL 2019 also delivers enhancements in the fundamental SQL Server database engine like feature parity on Linux systems. Additional significant innovations improve SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and SQL Server Reporting Services.

Because SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 have arrived at end of support status, migrating to a modern version of SQL Server makes sense for organizations concerned about compliance, compatibility, and productivity. Progent has two decades of background planning, deploying, optimizing, and troubleshooting SQL Server solutions and can help organizations of all sizes to perform an efficient upgrade to SQL Server 2019. Progent's Microsoft Gold-certified SQL Server experts can help your business to assess the advantages for transitioning to SQL Server 2019 from an older release of SQL Server and Progent can provide rapid remote or on-premises access to experts in system design, application development, database administration, and data security. Progent can assist your business to configure Microsoft SQL Server 2019 locally, in a private or public cloud, or in a hybrid network architecture.

You can work with Progent's experts on an occasional basis for jobs like system architecture review or troubleshooting or you can receive comprehensive project management and co-management support to make sure your Microsoft SQL Server 2019 migration is successfully carried out on time and within budget. Progent can provide the skills of certified network security experts, disaster recovery/business continuity preparedness specialists, and database software designers and programmers to ensure your Microsoft SQL Server 2019 deployment delivers top business value.

Progent's Microsoft Gold-certified consultants can also assist you to set up Microsoft SQL Server 2019 to work in conjunction with additional Microsoft products and technologies by providing support that includes Windows Server 2019 integration consulting, Hyper-V virtualization planning consulting, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 planning and integration expertise, SharePoint 2019 design and deployment consulting services, hybrid configuration with Azure cloud services, Skype for Business configuration expertise, Dynamics GP reporting consulting services, and System Center Operations Manager consultants.

Progent's seasoned application developers can assist your organization to design, produce, validate, deploy, and debug apps that use SQL Server 2019 and Progent can provide guidance in data modeling, OLTP, Data Warehousing and Mining, ETL, tuning, fault tolerance, backup/recovery, reporting, and integration support for Amazon MWS. To learn more about Progent's SQL Server development and debugging expertise, refer to SQL Server application development services.

SQL Server 2019 Editions
SQL Server 2019 is available in five basic editions distinguished by price, performance, scale and licensing rules. Progent can help you decide which editions make sense for your needs, and Progent can also help you simplify license management.

SQL Server 2019 Enterprise is the top-of-the-line edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2019 and is intended for mission-critical applications requiring the highest advanced levels of capacity, availability, and performance. Compute power and memory permitted per database match the operating system maximum, the number of VMs allowed is unlimited, and relational database size can be as high as 524 PB. HA features unique to the Enterprise edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2019 include Always On availability groups, online file restore, online index create and rebuild, pause and resume online index rebuilds, fast recovery, and hot add RAM and CPU. Expandability and performance functions for the Enterprise version of SQL Server 2019 include in-memory database, resource governance, auto optimization, batch mode adaptive joins plus row mode memory grant feedback. The Enterprise edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2019 also supports a more complete collection of data warehousing services, Master Data Services and Advanced Integration Services than other versions.

SQL Server 2019 Developer edition is essentially identical to the Enterprise version, but is licensed for use only for development and testing. The Developeredition is not licensed for use as a production server. Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Developer supports only a single client for SQL Server Distributed Replay simulation.

SQL Server 2019 Standard edition is intended for departments and small businesses who need a basic, low-maintenance platform for information management and BI. SQL Server 2019 Standard version supports all the security functions of SQL Server 2019 Enterprise, but processor scale is restricted to the lesser of 4 sockets or two dozen cores. For each instance of SQL Server Database Engine, the most RAM for the buffer pool cache is 128 GB, and maximum RAM-optimized data size is 32 GB. In contrast to the Enterprise edition, the Standard version of SQL Server 2019 does not come with advanced R and Python support and does not include Machine Learning Services, but supports the other development features and the administration utilities available with the Enterprise version. Advanced features like transparent data encryption and Big Data Clusters are now included with the Standard edition.

SQL Server 2019 Web edition is a value-priced option designed for web hosting organizations. CPU scale is limited to the smaller of 4 sockets or 16 cores, maximum buffer pool memory is 64 MB, and maximum memory per instance is 64 GB. In contrast to the Standard version of SQL Server 2019, SQL Server 2019 Web edition does not support Always On failover clusters, basic availability groups, or accelerated database recovery. The Web version also does not support transparent database encryption. You can profile Microsoft SQL Server Web with SQL Server Enterprise or SQL Server Standard versions, and SQL Server Web includes the other management features provided with the Standard version. Data warehousing, tabular and multidimensional models, BI Services, and certain Reporting Services are not provided.

SQL Server 2019 Express, available in several variants, is a free entry-level edition of Microsoft SQL Server intended for learning or for developing desktop, small-server, and client apps that do not require an advanced DBMS. Processing capacity is restricted to the lesser of 1 socket or four cores, max buffer pool memory is 1.41 MB, and maximum RAM-optimized data size is 352 MB. If applications created with Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Express expand to call for more capacity or additional functionality, you can upgrade seamlessly to more advanced editions of SQL Server. Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Express with Advanced Services adds Basic R and SQL Graph services, the distributed replay management tool, and SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Express with Advanced Services can also host a SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) database. SQL Server Express LocalDB is a trimmed down version of Express that operates in user mode and can be installed without configuration and with almost no prerequisites. The LocalDB version of Express shares the programmability functions of other Express releases but does not allow in-memory (Online Transaction Processing.

Parts of Microsoft SQL Server 2019
The SQL Server 2019 Installation Wizard enables you to select which of the Microsoft SQL Server components you wish to activate in your installation. These elements include:

SQL Server Database Engine
The Database Engine is the core of SQL Server's services for processing, holding, and protecting data. The Database Engine is used for replication, search, tools for managing relational data, supporting in-database analytics, supporting PolyBase for accessing outside data sources like Hadoop, and Machine Learning Services for analyzing SQL Server 2019's relational data with Python and R scripts.

SQL Server Analysis Services
SQL Analysis Services is an OLAP and data mining toolset for extracting useful information from data dispersed over multiple databases or contained in a variety of files or tables.

SSRS
SSRS provides a collection of local utilities and services that allow you to create, share, and administer tabular, matrix, graphical, and free-form reports. You can build responsive-design smart phone reports with the Mobile Report Publisher app and use integrated Power BI apps for handheld endpoints to access the data processed in SQL Server Reporting Services.

SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
SQL Server Integration Services is a set of programmable objects and no-code graphical utilities for blending data from multiple sources. ETL processes can be applied to XML data files, text, and relational data sources. Integration Services can be utilized for copying or downloading files, loading data warehouses, cleaning up and mining data, and controlling SQL Server data.

Master Data Services (MDS)
Master Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft SQL Server's Master Data Management (MDM) solution that enables businesses to create a centralized view of corporate-wide data, synchronizing data silos to eliminate redundancies and tracking data organization models to maintain consistency. An Excel extension allows you to publish the master data set across an organization.

In-Database Machine Learning Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Machine Learning Services allows you to run Python and R scripts with relational data sources without moving data outside SQL Server or over your network to another server. The open-source Microsoft Python and R packages can be used for machine learning.

New and Enhanced Features of SQL Server 2019
The headline new feature for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 is Big Data Clusters, which enables you to process massive data sets from Transact-SQL or Spark for machine learning solutions. Other new or enhanced features cover important areas such as the SQL Database Engine, feature equivalence between SQL Server on Linux and Microsoft SQL Server on Windows, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS).

Big Data Clusters
trusted execution environment Server 2019 debuts the Big Data Cluster, a cluster of Linux containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. The Big Data Cluster enables you to configure and use massively scalable clusters in interrelated SQL Server, Spark, and HDFS containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. Because these components can run concurrently, The Big Data Clusters feature allows you to analyze big data from either Microsoft Transact-SQL or Apache Spark and makes it easy to combine and process your SQL Server relational data with unstructured big data. Deployment models include virtualized data for processing external data silos without moving or replicating the data, data lakes made from HDFS storage pools to hold big data, and scale-out data marts to spread data from various sources across data pool nodes. You can use Spark or integrated R, Python, Scala, and Java utilities in Microsoft SQL Server 2019 for machine learning jobs on the data held in HDFS storage pools and data pools.

Additional Enhancements to the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Database Engine
Additional enhancements to the Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Database Engine cover smart databases, the developer environment, cybersecurity, HA, and Linux and Windows feature parity. Enhancements to the SQL Server 2019 Database Engine include:

• Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) improves the responsiveness of your existing workloads and is activated by default on the latest database compatibility level designation. Improvements include row mode memory grant feedback, batch mode execution without requiring columnstore indexes, scalar UDF Inlining, and table variable deferred compilation.
• Enhanced In-Memory Database features leverage contemporary hardware to enhance throughput and scale with new functions such as direct PMEM device access, reduced Metadata contention in TempDB, and support for creating Database Snapshots of SQL Server databases that include memory-optimized filegroups for In-Memory OLTP.
• Intelligent throughput improvements in Microsoft SQL Server 2019 address common bottlenecks and offer database configuration options to ensure more consistent execution speed for all applications. Enhancements include optimization for indexes prone to high-concurrency inserts, Query Store plan forcing support for fast forward and static cursors, more granular control of maximum memory limits for resource governance, reduced extraneous recompilations, improved indirect checkpoint scalability, shared latch update concurrency for Page Free Space (PFS), and scheduler worker migration for more balanced CPU utilization.
• Improvements to the developer environment include table and index partitioning for graph tables, support for UTF-8 import and export encoding, a new Java language software development kit (SDK), new spatial reference identifiers more closely aligned with global positioning systems, and more specific warnings to simplify troubleshooting truncation problems in unsuccessful extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes.
• Security improvements include the Always Encrypted feature with secure enclaves functionality, which permits operations on plaintext data within the trusted execution environment of a secure enclave on the server side instead of only on on the client side. This avoids the need to move data in and out of the database for operations like initial data encryption, thereby improving cryptographic speed. Also, certificate management is built into the SQL Server Configuration Manager. This streamlines tasks like checking and validating SSL/TLS certificates, flagging certificates close to their expiration, and implementing certificates across machines in Availability Groups and Failover Clusters. A new integrated Data Discovery and Classification feature assists you to classify and label columns in user tables. This can help you find where sensitive data resides and to follow information privacy standards and compliance regulations.

• For enhanced availability, SQL Server 2019 increases the highest allowable number of synchronous replicas within an Availability Group from 3 to 5. You can set up this group of five replicas to have auto failover within the group. You can have one primary replica along with four synchronous secondary replicas within a group. Also, secondary to primary replica R/W connection redirection for Always On AGs allows client app connections to be directed to the primary replica regardless of what target server is specified in the connections string. This feature brings replica connection redirection for deployments that are without an Availability Group listener as with a multi-subnet deployment in the cloud.
• The SQL Server Database Engine database recovery process has been redesigned in Microsoft SQL Server 2019 to support the Accelerated Database Recovery feature. This feature dramatically shortens the time needed to finish the recovery process after a failover or other disorderly termination. SQL Server Accelerated Database Recovery also slashes the time it takes to complete rollback of canceled long-duration transactions.
• Microsoft SQL Server on Linux approximates reaching feature equality with SQL Server on Windows through the addition of additional SQL Server on Linux features such as support for replication, the MSDTC and RPC endpoint mapper, AD authentication, Python and R, PolyBase for running external queries against remote data sources, CDC support, plus improved scale in TempDB file size and auto growth.

Enhancements to SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services
Enhancements to SSRS 2019 include:

• Support for Azure SQL Managed Instance allows you to host a database catalog for SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services (SSRS) in an Azure SQL MI hosted in a virtual machine or in your data center. You are required to use your database credentials for the connection to SQL MI.
• Support for Power BI datasets using either Microsoft Report Builder or SSDT. You can publish those reports to SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services (SSRS) by utilizing SSAS 2019 connectivity.
• Azure AD Application Proxy eliminates the necessity of managing your own web application proxy to permit secure access via the web or mobile apps.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2019 supports Transparent Database Encryption for the SQL Server 2019 Reporting Services catalog database for Enterprise and Standard editions of SQL Server.

Progent's SQL Server experts can help you to port your data and apps, set up test systems to verify SQL Server 2019's ability to support your business-critical applications, simplify management, design and carry out a company-wide security strategy that complies with regulatory and industry mandates, integrate mobile devices, and define a disaster preparedness/business continuity plan that incorporates the advanced HA technologies integrated into SQL Server 2019.

IT consulting services available from Progent for SQL Server 2019 include:

• Project Management and Co-management: Progent can provide project management and co-management consulting services to help your company to adhere to leading practices to ensure that your Microsoft SQL Server 2019 initiative is carried out on schedule and on budget. Project offers support from IT experts to help with any aspect project management including requirements analysis, readiness evaluation, solution architecture, migration planning, configuring pilot systems, implementation, optimization, documentation, education, administration, and on-demand remote or onsite advice and troubleshooting.
• Database Migration: Progent's veteran Database Administration consultants can provide expertisefor all releases of SQL Server, including end-of-support (EOS) releases such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. Progent can also provide Oracle consulting, MySQL solution design and development, and Microsoft Access expertise. Progent has two decades of background providing database consulting expertise and can help you to port your databases and apps to Microsoft SQL Server 2019 quickly and economically.
• Integration with Other Microsoft Applications: Microsoft's extensive catalog of enterprise applications, operating systems, development environments, management tools, and cloud services rely on SQL Server as their core database technology. Progent's Microsoft Gold-certified experts can assist you to integrate Microsoft SQL Server 2019 seamlessly with other Microsoft apps by offering consulting services that include Windows Server 2019 upgrade consulting, SharePoint Server 2019 application development, Power BI reporting expertise, Microsoft Exchange Server 2019 migration expertise and Microsoft 365 Exchange Online integration solutions, and Active Directory design and troubleshooting.
• Business Intelligence and Custom Reporting: Progent's business intelligence and custom reporting consultants can help you to utilize Microsoft's business Intelligence (BI) stack to build and publish BI reports that can be shared securely via any endpoint. Progent can assist your organization build PowerPivot models and utilize Microsoft SQL SSAS 2019 to manage tabular databases. Progent's Power BI specialists can assist you to connect to Power BI datasets using Microsoft Report Builder or SQL Server Data Tools and post reports to SSRS 2019 by using SQL Server Analysis Services connections. Progent's consultants can also help you to connect SQL Server 2019 with third-party BI reporting products such as or migrate from legacy reporting tools such as FRx.
• Network Infrastructure: Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE networking experts can assist your business to plan, implement, administer, and protect a resilient and responsive network architecture for your SQL Server 2019 environment. Progent can assist you design and deploy an optimal solution for any network model including on-premises or hybrid.
• Security and Compliance: Progent's security and compliance experts have been awarded prestigious data security certifications such as CISM, ISSAP and GIAC. Progent offers businesses of any sizes a selection of cybersecurity services covering vulnerability evaluation, enhancement, response, and remote monitoring and management services to defend against known and new cyber assaults such as ransomware and to verify compliance with regulatory and industry requirements.
• Virtualization Support: Progent can assist your business to design and configure an affordable and manageable virtual environment for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 and can provide access to certified Windows Hyper-V experts, VMware vSphere and vCloud experts, VMware NSX-certified consulting experts, and Citrix XenServer experts to assist your business to configure and manage a virtualized IT system.
• ProSight Remote Monitoring and Management Services: Progent offers a selection of budget-friendly, flat-rate services designed to enable small and mid-size businesses to utilize the same cutting-edge technology deployed by some of the industry's top corporations. Progent's ProSight suite of network management outsourcing services covers all critical facets of modern networking including email protection, security and compliance, automated backup/recovery, infrastructure management, virtual server cloud hosting, and network resources documentation management.
• Disaster Business Continuity Preparedness: Progent's disaster preparedness specialists can assist your business to develop and validate a disaster recovery strategy that incorporates SQL Server 2019's HA technology to maximize network resilience and shorten restore time for mission-critical applications. Progent's business continuity preparedness experts can assist your company to develop and test a detailed strategy to keep your core business processes operating in the event of a catastrophe. The business continuity strategy addresses IT infrastructure but also takes into account the logistics associated with issues like alternative alert systems and procedures, short-term office space, and regulatory mandates for reporting.
• Remote Guidance and Debugging: Progent has twenty years of background providing advanced consulting, software programming, and troubleshooting services remotely. Using online IT support allows you to minimize the expense and delay of network downtime. Progent has delivered remote IT services to businesses of all sizes in every state in the U.S. See Progent's customer testimonials.) Progent also offers on-site expertise in major metropolitan areas across the United States and Canada.

If you require immediate remote assistance from a Microsoft-certified support expert, see Progent's Online IT Support.

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