Four SQL Server professionals walked away with top honors in the first annual SQL Server Innovator Awards, presented at the SQL Server Magazine LIVE! conference in Orlando, Florida, this week. The Innovator Awards, sponsored by Microsoft, is an editorial-driven awards program designed to highlight outstanding business solutions that use SQL Server. The four winners were selected from a pool of highly qualified entries collected over a 3-month period.
"The field included more than 100 entries, and the selection process was rigorous," said Brian Moran, contributing editor for SQL Server Magazine and one of the five judges for the awards program. "We chose the winners based on their innovations' efficiencies, improved processes, and return on investments."
The award winners were Herts Chen, Dave Fackler, Paul Munkenbeck, and Zareer Siganporia. Chen, who works for the City of Portland, developed a solution that involved Analysis Services, traditional reporting techniques, and ESRI-based mapping objects, all of which produced a powerful traffic and accident data warehouse that publishes its data to the Web.
Fackler, with Intellinet Corporation, and his team received an Innovator Award for a telephony solution that integrates Microsoft relational and analytical tools, Data Transformation Services (DTS), XML-based recordsets, MSMQ, and custom COM objects.
Munkenbeck, with Maritz, Ltd., and his team created a solution based on modifying core replication stored procedures, which lets them update the master schema without requiring a full resync.
Siganporia, previously with SchlumbergerSema, was the fourth winner, and his entry was also selected as the best overall, capturing the Innovator Awards traveling trophy. His solution employed the creative use of metadata and custom code to detect when and how large data sets should be partitioned for maximum efficiency.
Brenda Roode, circulation manager for SQL Server Magazine, noted, "With over 100 entries, we feel that the enthusiasm the awards generated indicates the overall growth and strength of the SQL Server community."
