Infographic 4 Ways SQL Server beats Oracle

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4 Ways SQL Server Beats Oracle:

Intelligent Cloud Database: Everything Built In:
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Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296


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Announcing SQL Server on Linux

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Announcing SQL Server on Linux

By Scott Guthrie - Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft
It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. At the March Data Driven event in New York, we kicked off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability. This is the most significant release of SQL Server that we have ever done, and brings with it some fantastic new capabilities.

SQL Server 2016 delivers:

These improvements, and many more, are all built into SQL Server and bring you not just a new database but a complete platform for data management, business analytics and intelligent apps – one that can be used in a consistent way across both on-premises and the cloud. In fact, over the last year we’ve been using the SQL Server 2016 code-base to run in production more than 1.4 million SQL Databases in the cloud using our Azure SQL Database as a Service offering, and this real-world experience has made SQL Server 2016 an incredibly robust and battle-hardened data platform.
Gartner recently named Microsoft as leading the industry in their Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems in both execution and vision. We’re also a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, and Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, as well as leading in vision in the Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.

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Extending SQL Server to Also Now Run on Linux

Today I’m excited to announce our plans to bring SQL Server to Linux as well. This will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.
SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in.
“This is an enormously important decision for Microsoft, allowing it to offer its well-known and trusted database to an expanded set of customers”, said Al Gillen, group vice president, enterprise infrastructure, at IDC. “By taking this key product to Linux Microsoft is proving its commitment to being a cross platform solution provider. This gives customers choice and reduces the concerns for lock-in. We would expect this will also accelerate the overall adoption of SQL Server.”
“SQL Server’s proven enterprise experience and capabilities offer a valuable asset to enterprise Linux customers around the world,” said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat. “We believe our customers will welcome this news and are happy to see Microsoft further increasing its investment in Linux. As we build upon our deep hybrid cloud partnership, spanning not only Linux, but also middleware, and PaaS, we’re excited to now extend that collaboration to SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, bringing enterprise customers increased database choice.”
“We are delighted to be working with Microsoft as it brings SQL Server to Linux,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical. “Customers are already taking advantage of Azure Data Lake services on Ubuntu, and now developers will be able to build modern applications that utilize SQL Server’s enterprise capabilities.”
Bringing SQL Server to Linux is another way we are making our products and new innovations more accessible to a broader set of users and meeting them where they are. Just last week, we announced our agreement to acquire Xamarin. Recently, we also announced Microsoft R Server , our technologies based on our acquisition of Revolution Analytics, with support for Hadoop and Teradata.
The private preview of SQL Server on Linux is available starting today and we look forward to working with the community, our customers and our partners to bring it to market.
Please join me Satya Nadella, Joseph Sirosh and Judson Althoff at our Data Driven event on Thursday to hear more about this news and how Microsoft is helping customers transform their business using data.

Source: http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2016/03/07/announcing-sql-server-on-linux/

Managed Solution’s Team has the experience and expertise to architect SQL database and reporting systems tailored for your environment. Contact us for more information 800-307-0296


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Leaked #Pinterest Documents Show Revenue, Growth Forecasts via Techcrunch

Leaked Pinterest Documents Show Revenue, Growth Forecasts

Leaked Pinterest Documents Show Revenue, Growth Forecasts

As written on by Katie Roof (@Katie_Roof), Matthew Lynley (@mattlynley) on Techcrunch.com
TechCrunch has obtained documents that show Pinterest has been forecasting $169 million in revenue this year and $2.8 billion in annual revenue by 2018. Pinterest was also expecting to grow its monthly active users to 151 million by the end of 2015 and 329 million by 2018.
Andreessen Horowitz used this information to solicit limited partners to invest in its special investment fund for Pinterest earlier this year, valuing the social media company at $11 billion.
The venture firm said that Pinterest is “striving to build a platform with the scale and engagement of Facebook and the purchasing intent of Google.”
The documents say that based on the fourth quarter of last year, Pinterest’s “revenue run rate” stood at $90 million. As the WSJ noted in June, this means that Pinterest brought in less than $25 million in revenue last year because the company first introduced its “promoted pins” in late 2014.
The papers show that Pinterest is generating $1.44 per active user, based on its 2015 projections. It expects this number to grow by $9.34 by 2018.
While Target is already a confirmed partner for some of Pinterest’s e-commerce initiatives, the company was “in discussions” with Burberry, Walmart, and Nordstrom as of February 2015.
The documents also reveal that over half of U.S. women between the ages of 18-54 have signed up for Pinterest. The social media service showed strong growth amongst male users, growing 133% last year.
Pinterest is seeing its strongest growth outside of the U.S., accounting for 60% of new users. The fastest growing markets last year were the UK, Japan, France, Germany and Brazil.
The data also shows that roughly half of Pinterest users log in. As of January 2015, the company had 176 million registered users, but only 88 million active users. (In September, Pinterest confirmed that it had surpassed 100 million active users).
Related Articles
Pinterest Expands Buyable Pins To More E-Commerce Platforms, Reaching Thousands Of Merchants
Pinterest Brings On A New Head Of Its Advertising Partner APIs
Pinterest’s primary advertising product is Promoted Pins, which gives marketers a way to get their pins in front of more users. It uses traditional advertising models like cost-per-click advertising, but can also charge marketers based on “engagement” — such as a re-pin, a close-up or a click on that pin.
The primary reason Pinterest is so valued by advertisers is it hits almost all points in which people can be targeted on the web. Pinterest users casually browse for ideas or inspiration, which can help drive brand awareness and justify purchasing promoted pins. But they also search on Pinterest for specific things, giving marketers a way to capture that intent and drive traffic — and potentially sales — using Promoted Pins. Promoted Pins give marketers a way to capture that intent or get visibility, while other platforms are generally good at capturing specific moments — such as Google with search.
Pinterest is also still releasing new products for marketers. For example, the company released Cinematic Pins — its take on a video-based advertisement that essentially plays only when the user scrolls — in May this year. It also released a new pricing model at that time that allowed marketers to pay based on engagement with their Promoted Pins. And it also earlier this year released Buyable Pins, a way for users to purchase things directly through Pinterest — and while merchants keep 100% of the sales, it gives them an incentive to promote pins on Pinterest in order to further drive sales.
All of this taken together gives advertisers a gold mine of sorts that might not necessarily be available in other outlets. Given the high engagement its users have, part of the sales pitch is that they have a much higher conversion rate than other platforms. Pinterest is super sticky and people wander around on it at basically all points of the funnel.
The social media site has raised over $1.3 billion in capital from notable investors including SV Angel, Rakuten and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Pinterest declined to comment. Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.

Create holograms to bring ideas to life. Help develop the future. The first Microsoft HoloLens devices will ship in the first quarter of 2016 to developers in the US and Canada.

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Create holograms to bring ideas to life. Help develop the future. The first Microsoft HoloLens devices will ship in the first quarter of 2016 to developers in the US and Canada.

Interact with digital content in the most natural way possible. Teach and learn more efficiently, visualize your work, and share ideas with others more effectively.

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Whoever said data is dull? David McCandless of Information is Beautiful turns figures into works of art with the new Office. Watch this video to learn more about his creative process:

VIDEO: David McCandless, renowned data journalist and speaker, uses the world’s data to create powerful and provocative data visualizations and stories with Office.

'@Metro_Bank is using Power BI to identify problems before they can affect the bank’s relationship with customers. Read the full customer story here.

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Building a bank that can surprise and delight with Power BI

When Metro Bank opened in London in 2010, it was a brash competitor in a seriously traditional industry. The vision? To redefine the relationship people have with their bank by innovating customer service. With such offerings as seven-day-a-week store hours and lightning-quick service — a customer can open an account and get a debit card within minutes — the bank built a foundation for fast growth, doubling in size year after year and soaring to more than 500,000 customer accounts.
But with that growth has come a need for deeper and more detailed information about what customers want and need — how they interact with the bank’s services, including stores, online, telephony and mobile. Metro Bank needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that could quickly and accurately provide information to guide analysis and decision-making. Microsoft Power BI gave Metro Bank what it was looking for, with interest.

A focus on customers

“We set out to create fans, not customers,” says Bruce Rioch, head of Business Information and Customer Systems at Metro Bank. “We want to surprise and delight. We want to be the bank that our customers tell their family and friends about — the bank that offers amazing customer service and has a simple, understandable proposition.”
To provide an innovative, personalized service, Metro Bank needs to capture rich detail about its customers, from how long it takes to resolve their questions via telephone call centers, to identifying peak times for transactions conducted via the bank’s mobile app. And those details need to be clear and easy to understand, and available to the right person at the right time.
“As we’ve grown, more and more people have been asking questions about how effective or efficient the service is, and how well we are providing services,” Rioch says. “We struggled along during the first few years; we had what we needed. But as we've grown bigger, the question has become ‘how on earth do we provide the right information to the right people at the right time?’”

A system that looks familiar

Metro Bank decided to implement Microsoft Power BI because the solution integrated easily with the bank’s existing Microsoft stack, and was easy for colleagues to quickly learn and personalize for their daily needs.
“Power BI is our only BI solution,” Rioch says. “We had a solution previously that was fine for us as a brand-new startup organization. But as we grew, we needed something more dynamic, more visually appealing and more user-friendly for our colleagues. Power BI fits the bill in all of those respects.”

Metro Bank uses Power BI to track customer interactions, internal metrics and more:

•Call center operations. Power BI enables Metro Bank to track call volume, service levels, customer demographics, call times and shift scheduling. Reporting data is refreshed each night so colleagues have a clear picture of the previous day, weeks, months or year.
•Mobile and Internet banking. Colleagues can analyze data including the volume and types of transactions customers are performing online, the devices they use, and peak activity times throughout the day. “We get a real sense of how the channels are growing, and how they're being used by our customers, and what services they use once they're inside that service,” Rioch says. “Which is quite important because it helps us direct what we build next.”
•Customer dissatisfaction reports. Metro Bank can track customer complaints, including the rate of open complaints per 1,000 accounts, the time it takes to resolve them and the departments involved. One key feature is the ability to flag the most urgent complaints so that colleagues can take steps to resolve them before the deadline for reporting an outstanding issue to regulatory bodies.
•Staffing and workload planning. Power BI collects data on peak activity times in bank branches, types of transactions and other customer activity details, enabling Metro Bank to plan staffing to meet customer demands — for example, identifying the busiest hour of the busiest day of the month per branch — and help ensure quick, efficient service.

Rich detail, easy to visualize

By collecting rich detail and making it easy to analyze through personalized dashboards, Power BI helps bank colleagues identify problems before they can affect the bank’s relationship with the customer. Colleagues can combine details from account activity, data from customer satisfaction surveys, branch traffic patterns and more to understand which proactive solutions can make the biggest difference to the customer experience. Similar survey data offers insight into the employee experience, or what Rioch calls “the voice of the colleague.”
“The internal survey is built out of the dashboard,” Rioch says. “In the past it would have been all spreadsheet-driven; this year we've been able to display the colleague results really visually — and fantastically."
As a participant in the Power BI Preview, Metro Bank is also working with Microsoft developers to preview and test new features and offer feedback on functionality. The bank’s input helps shape the future of Power BI. And the dynamic program provides frequent updates, helping Metro Bank continually improve its customer service and offerings built on new capabilities.
“We use Power BI for everything,” Rioch says. “We love this product.”
Source: https://customers.microsoft.com
Read more customer success stories or search by industry to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.

#NSA sets date for purge of surveillance phone records @LisaVaas

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The National Security Agency (NSA) has set a date to purge phone records collected during its bulk surveillance program.
"Analytic access" to the five years worth of records will end on 29 November, and they'll be destroyed three months later, it said in a statement released on Monday.
There are two reasons for the three-month lag:
1. The bulk telephony metadata has to be preserved until civil litigation regarding the program is resolved or until courts relieve NSA of such obligations. From the statement:
As soon as possible, NSA will destroy the Section 215 bulk telephony metadata upon expiration of its litigation preservation obligations.
2. Also, "solely for data integrity purposes" to verify the records produced under the new, targeted production authorized by the USA Freedom Act, the NSA will allow technical personnel to access the historical metadata for those additional three months.
For a while there, it didn't look like the NSA would ever let go of its death grip on the records.
"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, well, at least for 180 days," US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) Judge Michael W. Mosman wrote last month, as he jauntily granted a six-month extension to the agency's bulk collection of phone metadata.
Earlier in June, there had been a standoff on Capitol Hill around the renewal of lapsed spying provisions of the Patriot Act: a standoff that was resolved with the passage of the Freedom Act, which resurrected the three spying-centric Patriot Act provisions that presidential candidate Senator Rand Paul single-handedly forced into retirement when those provisions expired at midnight on 1 June.
The FISC rationalized the six-month extension by saying that the enactment of the Freedom Act allowed for some "transition period" under which the NSA could continue its bulk data collection.
On the 29 November deadline, NSA analysts will be able to request restricted phone metadata from phone companies on an as-needed basis.
The statement put out by the government on Monday said that at the same time, access to previously collected records will cease.
As far as the NSA's legal obligation to preserve the data for ongoing litigation goes, the government didn't specify which cases it was referring to.
Such litigation likely includes cases brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that have claimed that the bulk-surveillance program was unconstitutional and not statutorily authorized.
by Lisa Vaas
Source: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2015/07/29/nsa-sets-date-for-purge-of-surveillance-phone-records/

Special Olympics uses the Microsoft Cloud to change how 4.8 million athletes get results. See how.

See how the Microsoft Cloud enables Special Olympics to change how 4.8 million athletes celebrate results.