Read the case given below and answer the questions given at the end.

CASE STUDY-2

SQL Server 2008 improves supervision of 20,000 company cars

Situation

Secar Bohemia operates automobile tracking systems, systems for monitoring vehicles, people and objects, and fleetmanagement services including electronic drive logging. These services are provided in collaboration with Telefonica 02 Czech Republic and branded "02 Car Control".The CarControl system currently (beginning of 2008) includes about 3 billion records amounting up to 1 TB, and it is being used by tens of thousands users worldwide, from China to the Russian Federation, in ten language versions.It is designed to simplify car fleet operations for companies, with special focus on decreasing costs and providing logistics functionality. The system allows up to 20% cost savings on company fleet operations. Key system features include monitoring vehicle movement data and facilitating analysis of that information in the form of output reports.The CarControl system is based on the .NET technology and uses Microsoft SQL Server as the database back-end.The system is distributed across a number of servers with specific assigned roles. Generally, servers in the system comprise four categories:

1. Routers - communication servers, which pre-process incoming data, identify it, classify specific instances, and alsomanage the units onboard the vehicles.

2. Application Servers - host the end-user web-/lnternet-based applications that users interact with.

3. Database servers - store data and provide basic application logic on the database level (such as generating standard reports).

4. Analytics servers - these are special-purpose servers that perform complex analytic and database operations, such as evaluation of data from the traffic and logistics features. In addition, these servers are used to generate more sophisticated output reports.

Secar Bohemia had great expectations for the development and new features available in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for the purposes of improving CarControl. "We realize that in order to succeed in a fiercely competitive environment, we have to constantly evolve and enhance our system and keep offering new features to users, to improve the efficiency of car fleet management. Opportunities for further development are exactly what the new Microsoft SQL Server 2008 offers," said Petr Vacek, Deputy Chairman of Secar Bohemia. In 2007, Secar Bohemia increasingly received requests for advanced analysis of input information, and more importantly, for visual presentation of output data such as charts. In addition, the system required optimizations in terms of performance as well as storage size, due to the massively increasing number of customers in the system. Last but not least, work had commenced on the development of a module to monitor the traffic situation.Secar Bohemia in partnership with KAKTUS Software, which is responsible for the development of CarControl and is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, decided to evaluate the pre-release version of Microsoft SQL Server 2008.This was motivated by the fact that Secar Bohemia was satisfied with the functionality of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 servers that had acted as the core of the Car Control system. Also considered were the low costs of upgrading to the new SQL Server, ease of migration and overall simplicity of moving to the new system. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 was the undisputable winner in all those considerations.There are several instances of CarControl in operation, three of them in production and one for development and testing. It stands to reason that the initial deployment was completed on the testing version. This involved updating the central database server and the server that processes analytic workloads. Thanks to new database compression and management features, the volume of data decreased substantially, as did the requirements for available disk storage.The most important features evaluated were deployed on the analytics server. This is where the testing and successfuldeployment of the following new features was completed: processing of spatial, geometrical and geographical data for the purposes of implementing traffic monitoring tasks, in conjunction with an application developed using SilverLight, also a new technology. Furthermore, a number of advanced analytics were developed and made available to users as reports. The developers implementing the new reports gave high praise to the new Designer tool and visual data presentation capabilities, especially as charts. The test mode was terminated in March 2008. There were no major issues identified in testing. Secar Bohemia is planning to deploy Microsoft SQL Server 2008 to the remaining instances by the end of 2008.

Benefits
Testing has confirmed that Microsoft SQL Server 2008 is stable and robust, and it provides a number of new features that can be used to expand CarControl in future.

Spatial data
The new SQL Server 2008 enables storing and processing of a wide range of new data types. These include new date and time types. This simplifies and accelerates processing this information. It is also possible to store larger binary data directly to disk. The HierarchylD data type lets developers structure interdependent information in the form of a tree. Last but not least, there are new data types that handle spatial data.

Data analysis and output reports
This is an area where SQL Server 2008 provides a large number of new features. Among the first to be used in CarControl were the output report generating capabilities. For instance, SQL Server enables creating reports in the new Designer tool, closely linking the resulting reports with Microsoft Office products. The key features of the new server that CarControl has put to use include the capability to present data graphically as charts, which can now have a much more attractive appearance compared to the previous version. "Reliability and rich features are a matter of course in various systems. However, we acknowledge that emotional approach to products is also very significant. That is why systems developed by us offer top-class graphic design and user experience. To achieve this in the CarControl project, Microsoft has provided a tool that enables us to do just that," said David Kalous, Director of KAKTUS Software.

System administration
The new Management Studio significantly decreases the complexity of SQL server administration. SQL Server now includes a new policy framework, which enables setting and enforcing the same configuration settings and policies across multiple servers. New data types and data compression capabilities simplify data space management.

Results
Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008 provide a secure and trusted platform for creating and running your most demanding applications. Combined, the products provide a solid foundation for next-generation web applications, broad support for virtualization technology, and access to relevant information. Advanced security technology, developer support for the latest platforms, improved management and web tools, flexible virtualization solutions, and access to relevant information from throughout your organization enable a broad array of technology solutions

SQL Server improves supervision of 20,000 company cars

Questions:
(a) What was the business problem at Secar Bohemia?

(b) Briefly explain the benefits reaped by this company after moving to a new system on SQL server 2008.