Lemington Consulting

As Microsoft Certified SQL Server experts with decades of experience implementing SQL Server solutions for clients across the United States and internationally, Lemington provides a wide variety of SQL Server consulting services for its clients. Our certified SQL Server professionals can provide database administration (DBA) services who businesses and organizations lacking the internal expertise to manage complex database environments and database servers. Outsourcing database administration duties to a firm like Lemington Consulting is frequently done, whether the database is hosted by the client, or alternatively, the database is hosted at Lemington Consulting, in Microsoft Azure, or another cloud database provider.

Lemington Consulting also provides database integration services through SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to many types of data sources including on premise data stores, cloud data stores, or data provided by REST API interfaces from third-party data providers. Lemington has the expertise to bring together data from many disparate data sources into a comprehensive data warehouse which can be access seamlessly through Power BI, SharePoint, or other KPI dashboards.

Lemington Consulting has been working with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) since its inception, as well as SQL Server business intelligence features including Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, and other reporting and business intelligence tools. Lemington can develop, design, and implement SSRS reporting solutions and business intelligence dashboards to provide organizations with the key metrics needs to efficiently and productively manage their operations seamlessly.

Lemington Consulting provides many other SQL Server consulting services including database performance tuning, migrations of data from other data sources to SQL Server, and upgrades of older SQL Server software to newer versions of SQL Server. In addition, with certified Microsoft software developers on staff, Lemington Consulting can assist with database application built on top of SQL Server database including rearchitecting existing SQL Server databases to improve performance and reduce bottlenecks.

Yes, Lemington Consulting is a long-time Microsoft Partner, Microsoft reseller, and Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) and has been reselling Microsoft licenses for more than 20 years. Currently, Microsoft only offers Standard and Enterprise versions of SQL Server 2025. SQL Server Web Edition was deprecated starting with SQL Server 2025 and is no longer offered for resale. SQL Server Standard Edition can be licensed either on a per-core basis (4 core minimum) or on a server plus client access license (CAL) basis. Traditionally, the Server + CAL licensing model is less expensive for roughly 30 users or less, and the per-core licensing is less expensive for user counts above 30 or so users. SQL Server Enterprise Edition is licensed only on a per-core basis with no Server + CAL licensing option available.

Of course, as has been tradition for many years now, SQL Server licenses can be purchased with Software Assurance, an additional set of benefits beyond the actual licenses themselves. Software Assurance must be acquired at the time of purchase of the SQL Server licenses and cannot be purchased later. While the list of Software Assurance benefits for SQL Server are many (please contact us for details), some of the benefits include the Azure Hybrid benefit that allows the SQL Server licenses to be used in Microsoft Azure, new version rights to newer versions of SQL Server when released in the future at no additional cost, and fail-over server rights for disaster recover either on premise or in Microsoft Azure.

SQL Server can also be licensed on a subscription basis (i.e. not perpetual) for 1 or 3 year terms. SQL Server subscription licenses include similar benefits to SQL Server perpetual licenses with Software Assurance. These SQL Server subscription licenses are similar to Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise licenses and can be purchased from Lemington as a designated Cloud Solution Provider (CSP).

SQL Server offers many advantages over other types of databases. Some of those advantages include the following:

• Security: SQL Server provides two security models including integration with Windows Authentication to provide robust security platform for managing your organizations information. Security can be managed across all database objects including tables, views, stored procedures and at a very granular level, to provide complete information security. Database encryption is now available as well to secure SQL Server database at rest.
• Scalability: SQL Server is a highly scalable enterprise database platform capabable of managing petabytes of data while delivery high performance. This allows organizations to deploy SQL Server databases with the confidence that SQL Server can continue to deliver superior performance even as their needs and businesses grow.
• High Availability/Failover: SQL Server provides a variety of high availablity features including fail over clustering availale on the Standard and Enterprise editions, database mirroring, log shipping, and database snapshots to meet your organizations' needs.
• Business Intelligence: SQL Server Standard and Enterprise Editions come with extensive business intelligence capabilities through SQL Server Analysis Services. Analytical models can be developed to breakdown business information to provide business insights for managing and forecasting business needs. SQL Server also comes with integrated reporting capabilities from SQL Server Reporting Services which allows organizations to access business critical information across the organization. In more recent versions of SQL Server, PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel has been added to allow users another familiar tool for analyzing business data.
• Integration: SQL Server provides a robust set of integration tools call SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) which can be used considate data from multiple heterogenous data sources for holistic data view and comprehensive data analysis. SSIS can also be used to migrate data from other database formats (Oracle, DBase, Paradox, legacy formats, Microsoft Access) to SQL Server.

Windows applications using the Microsoft .NET Framework, Visual Basic (VB) 6.0 applications, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) applications including Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel, web applications (ASP.NET), and web services (.NET web services). SQL Server is also the database backend for many existing software applications including SharePoint Server, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Microsoft Project Server, etc., and these applications can integrated with other SQL Server applications. Existing SQL Server applications can also be enhanced to add new functionality, and migrated to newer versions of SQL Server to take advantages of new features.

You have a number of options for hosting SQL Server databases in the cloud. Lemington Consulting provides its own custom SQL Server hosting services for applications built around SQL Server. Because Lemington Consulting can uniquely and granularly control its own SQL Server hosting environment, this gives our customers more flexibility in customizing their SQL Server hosting experience. This is a significant benefit over other SQL Server hosting services where the hosting environment is highly constrained, limiting what customers can do with the SQL Server hosting environment.

In addition, Microsoft Azure allows for the hosting of SQL Server databases either through the Microsoft Azure SQL database service, the Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance offering, or by creating a dedicated virtual server in the cloud. Microsoft Azure SQL Database service works well for straightforward database designs since the full features of SQL Server are not all available to the end user. Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance service gets closer to offering the full features of SQL Server although there are still a few limitations. Obviously, Microsoft SQL Server Managed Instance is meant for end users willing to administrate and maintain a larger number of databases with more complex hosting requirements.

The reasons for using SQL Server cloud hosting are many. First, there is the scalability factor. Cloud SQL Server databases can be scaled much more quickly than on premise resources to allow organizations to quickly scale their databases in response to increased demand. This contrasts to slower scalability for on premise SQL Server where servers and licenses would have to be procured before scalability can be achieved. Second, there are better options for backup, recovery, disaster recovery, and other redundancies across regions or even countries to protect your databases in the event of unforeseen circumstances.

When using SQL Server you have several options for hosting the SQL Server database. One you can host the SQL Server database yourself if you have the requisite hardware and desire to host your own SQL Server database. For many small and medium size businesses, however, SQL Server hosting can present a challenge. Fortunately, with the increased Internet bandwidth available today, many businesses are turning to outsourcing their SQL Server hosting to companies like Lemington or using SQL Azure.

SQL Azure is a robust platform for SQL Server hosting, although there are a number of limitations placed on what you can do with a SQL Azure hosted database. SQL Server hosting companies like Lemington can be more flexibile in their hosting environments and offer more options and fewer limitations on hosting a SQL Server database. Which option is better depends on the specific hosting situation.

Outsourcing SQL Server hosting is economical because the server, maintenance and SQL Server licensing costs can be spread across many hosting customers, thus reducing the hosting cost for any individual hosting customer. If you are interested in exploring the outsourcing of your SQL Server database please contact us for more information.

Yes, SQL Server has its own reporting engine beginning with SQL Server 2005. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a web-based, enterprise class reporting engine supporting many advanced reporting features. SSRS can be deployed in two different scenarios: the standard SSRS deployment and a SharePoint integrated deployment which allows users to view SSRS reports inside an existing SharePoint web site.

Paramaterized reports, report subscriptions, support for non-SQL Server data sources, custom security and role-based security, and report drill down are just a few of the features of SSRS. In addition, reports can be exported in a variety of formats including Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, PDF, and text files (comma separated values (csv), etc. Based SSRS reporting features can be found the Express edition of SQL Server, with the Standard, Business Intelligence and Enterprise editions providing many of the more advanced SSRS features.

SSRS has the ability to import report designs from other reporting engines such as Microsoft Access. This import capabiility can help smooth the transition from Microsoft Access to a SQL Server based solution by allowing you to upgrade your Microsoft Access reports seemlessly without having to create the underlying reports.

Yes, starting with SQL Server 2008 there is now support for Spatial data including a Spatial data type and Spatial indexes. Planar and geodetic data types are now supported in all versions of SQL Server. Support for the geometry data type includes the ability to store ploygons, lines and other two dimensional data such as geographic data, architectural or engineering design data. The Geography data type supports integration with location aware services such as Microsoft Virtual Earth. Store map and location directly in the database and retrieve this information to displaying in mapping applications or other location aware services.

With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft introduced SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to replace the older Data Transformation Services (DTS) available in SQL Server 2000 and earlier versions. SSIS provides a wealth of integration capabilities between everything from flat files (text files, comma separated value or .csv files), to Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Oracle, DB2, SAP, Teradata, and many other data sources. Data cannot only be integrated but transformed as well, including complex transformations using .NET programming.

All versions of sQL Server contain the standard Import/Export Wizard which can handle many common data integration tasks. Beyond this, the Standard and Business Intelligence editions provide for basic transformations and data profiling. The full set of SSIS features is now only available in the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server including support for data mining, SAP integration, high performance data transfers, and various types of lookup transformations.