Another one of our fabulous sponsors is giving a belated Valentine’s Day present to our Cruisers.  (Or is it an early St. Patrick’s Day gift?)  Idera, our newest sponsor for SQL Cruise Miami 2011, brings a great range of tools to the SQL community and they’re also bringing those tools to the Cruisers for free!  Yes, for those cruisers on board the Miami 2011 cruise Idera will provide a single seat of any or all of their SQL Server tools listed below to them for one year:

SQL diagnostic manager provides monitoring of 500+ performance counters (plus your own custom counters), alerting, diagnostic tools, trending, reporting and more.
 
SQL safe compresses backups up to 95% and completes backups at least 50% faster than native tools. Plus, SQL safe makes it easy to manage backups across all SQL Servers from a central console.
 
SQL compliance manager provides customizable, low-impact auditing of all user activity and data changes. Need to comply with SOX, HIPAA, PCI DSS or other regulations?  SQL compliance manager will knock your auditors SOX off!
 
SQL secure provides a complete picture of the security of your SQL Server environment including analysis of effective rights, vulnerability assessments and comparison to security best practices.
 
SQL defrag manager identifies fragmenation hot spots and takes action to defragment automatically, or on demand.
 
SQL toolbox, which includes:

• NEW SQL doctor analyzes the performance of SQL Server and provides prioritized recommendations for improving performance, PLUS the T-SQL needed to implement the recommendations.
• SQL virtual database attaches backups to SQL Server as if they were real databases. No more waiting for a backup to complete to recover data or objects, access them instantly with SQL virtual database.
• SQL safe lite – High performance backup compression in an easy-to-use scriptable interface.
• SQL admin toolset – 25 tools to simplify day-to-day administrative tasks.
• SQL comparison toolset compares databases object and schema and generates scripts to synchronize them.
   
  All of which constitutes a $9,524 value for the SQL Cruiser simply for joining us on the cruise!

Additionally, on board SQL Cruise Miami Idera is partnering with us to host the first Idera Iditarod.  Perhaps a misnomer for our warmer climes for this cruise, but appropriate for the Alaskan cruise this May.  Cruisers will be separated into teams and sent on their way through various challenges on the ship, earning clues that take them to the next stop.  Think computer camp meets the Amazing Race – without the roadblocks though!  Enrolled cruisers on the winning team will be awarded a Flip minio.

Thank you Idera, for your generosity to the our Cruisers and to the SQL Server Community!