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Frank X. Shaw defends Windows disclosure strategy, denies aping Apple

Microsoft’s head of corporate communications defended his company’s Windows information disclosure strategy Tuesday, denying that Microsoft has adopted Apple’s “cone of silence” approach to imparting news.

“We know we’re not Apple,” Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s top communications executive, said in an interview yesterday. “We would love to have control all along the stack, as Apple does. But that’s not the business we’re in.”
Frank X. Shaw
Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Corporate Communication, in a photo he uses on his Twitter account. (Image: Frank X. Shaw.)

Microsoft’s communications strategy, specifically the way it reveals information about Windows to a broad audience — developers, PC makers, enterprise customers, consumers, the press and analysts — has been criticized by several of the latter. Windows 8 suffered because of Microsoft’s penchant for withholding information, those analysts have contended.

Developers were not provided enough information and tools to craft top-quality apps for the October 2012 launch, OEMs were caught short of touch-enabled devices, and enterprises remain confused about why they should adopt the new OS, the arguments go.

Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, has put it most succinctly when he claimed that Microsoft, seeing the success of Apple’s habit of divulging nothing until a product announcement, copied the strategy. “Microsoft doesn’t make a good Apple,” Moorhead said in an interview Monday.

Shaw wasn’t having any of that. “It’s an easy shorthand for people to use, but it’s not accurate,” said Shaw of the Apple comparison. “We choose our strategy on the needs that we have. There are times when we will be more conservative and times when we will be more open.”

Analysts, some who have requested anonymity for fear of risking their access to Microsoft, have been the most vocal about the relative paucity of information disclosed by the Redmond, Wash. developer, and have compared that strategy to what they saw as a more open communications game plan prior to Windows 7, which shipped in the fall of 2009.

The more secretive approach has been credited to Stephen Sinofsky, who until his ouster last year led the Windows division during development of Windows 7 and the follow-on, Windows 8. Sinofsky was known for keeping things under wraps when he led Office development for several editions, closing out his time on that team with Office 2007.

Shaw acknowledged that Microsoft’s approach to doling out information to the media, analysts, developers and OEMs is different today. “Yes, it has changed, because the world we’re living in has changed,” said Shaw. “If you look at Windows 7 and then look at Windows 8, there were a whole bunch of things with Windows 8 that we wanted to keep more confidential than public. Look at the decision to build Windows 8 on ARM. That was held very closely.

“But I think that’s a hard comparison to make,” Shaw continued, speaking of the contrast between Windows 8 secrets and pre-Windows 7 openness. “Windows 8 represented a significant platform shift, with touch, Windows available on ARM as well as Intel, a new app model and a new store, and a new set of hardware from us.”

In many cases, Microsoft has taken to parceling out information in small bits, a drip-drip-drip strategy that, to outsiders at least, seems to serve little purpose. The best illustration was when the company announced last week that it would release a public preview of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD conference in late June, but said it would provide other information, including pricing, “in a few weeks.” Just seven days later, however, Tami Reller, CFO of the Windows division, said that update would be free.

When asked why Microsoft didn’t simply give customers both pieces at the same time, Shaw did not directly answer. Instead, he said, “There are many options, and this was the one that we chose. We thought that it was the best way to get the information out.”

Microsoft has made other communication missteps recently. Earlier this year, when news broke that it was permanently tying each retail Office 2013 license to the first PC it was installed on, and would not allow users to later move that license to another machine, the company limited the disclosure to the end-user licensing agreement (EULA), which very few people read, then only confirmed the move after several rounds of questions from Computerworld. In March, after a heated reaction from users, Microsoft backtracked from the licensing lock-in.

“There’s a big continuum,” Shaw said. “At times we are unbelievably transparent, at times we are moderately transparent, and at times we are quiet. What drives this is not a corporate one-size-fits-all strategy, but the demands of the product or service, and the marketplace.”

Shaw also took exception to the point many have made that developers were not kept as informed about Windows 8 as in past iterations of the OS, and that what they did get was much later in the development cycle than in the past. That contributed to the Windows Store’s app tally and the omission, still, of some major apps, such as one dedicated to Facebook, the theory goes.

“We did tons of work with developers and ISVs to get them ready and to train them,” said Shaw, citing the 2011 BUILD conference and follow-on efforts. “The thing that people have to recognize is that until Windows 8 shipped, there were zero targeted devices.”

And sans those devices, implied Shaw, it was no surprise that at launch the app store had relatively few apps. “Developers are rational creatures,” he said, hinting that until they had hardware they could use to test their apps, they took a wait-and-see stance. “We had realistic expectations of what [the app store] would look like at launch. There was never a ‘work-done’ moment for us related to the launch.”

In the interview, Shaw again blasted press coverage of Windows 8.1. Some stories and opinion pieces described the changes Microsoft might make with the update as a retreat from its previous vision for the OS, and compared Windows 8 to the Coca-Cola debacle of 1985, when within months of the introduction of “New Coke,” the beverage giant yanked the reformulated soda.

Shaw’s counter-attack drew criticism of its own, with Moorhead saying it was a sign of weakness for a company as large as Microsoft to be thin-skinned.

Shaw disagreed. “These things stick,” he said of pieces by The Financial Times and The Economist, which he had earlier singled out as examples of what he called “sensationalism and hyperbole.”

“If you don’t do anything about it, it can become perceived wisdom,” said Shaw, explaining why he wrote the Friday post. “If we don’t say anything, then we shouldn’t expect other people to read our minds. So we get our voice out there.”

Speaking of New Coke, Shaw even had a take on the metaphor.

“If anything, Windows 8 is like Diet Coke,” said Shaw. “Diet Coke was a product that mapped an entirely new need expressed by the marketplace, something that tasted just like Coke but had zero calories.”

Diet Coke is the world’s second-biggest soda, behind only Coke itself and ahead of Pepsi, which it passed in 2010.

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Company proclaims it’s compliant with ISO 27034-1

Microsoft says its coding practices and its corporate management structure both comply with an international application security standard to encourage secure software development.

Today at its Security Development Conference the company has issued a declaration of conformity with ISO 27034-1, an international standard that addresses secure coding practices as well as the organizational framework in which code is developed.

SURVEY: Security practices wanting in virtual machine world
Microsoft says its security development lifecycle meets or exceeds requirements of ISO 27034-1, meaning that other organizations that follow SDL are that much closer to ISO 27034-1 compliance. An addendum to the standard cites SDL as a template that can help organizations comply, Microsoft says.

The declaration comes from Microsoft and is not the same as if a separate certification body had reviewed Microsoft practices and declared them compliant.

Software developed in compliance with the standard comes with some assurance that it is less likely to be vulnerable to exploits. In addition, organizations that develop in-house applications in accordance with the standard have some assurance that the investment they make in compliance will put them on a track to what is widely regarded as a proven route to more secure code.

Coding practices could use greater attention to security, according to a survey commissioned by Microsoft last fall. Of 2,726 respondents made up of IT pros and application developers, 37% say their organizations build their products with security in mind. Of the 492 developers in the poll 61% say they don’t take advantage of risk mitigation technologies that already exist such as address space layout randomization (ASLR), Structured Exception Handler Overwrite Protection (SEHOP) and data execution prevention (DEP).

The survey indicates that reasons for failing to use these techniques include convincing management that the cost of employing them is worthwhile.

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Untreated, Internet Explorer vulnerabilities could lead to remote code execution exploits

Microsoft is issuing critical security bulletins this Patch Tuesday that affect all versions of Internet Explorer and deal with an exploit that attackers are actively working.

Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the recipients of a patch that can prevent an exploit that enables remote code execution in the browser. This affects all Windows operating systems except XP.

“We always recommend upgrading to the latest version of any software,” says Paul Henry, security and forensic analyst with Lumension, “as that’s typically the most secure. If your system is compatible with IE 10 and you’re not running it already, upgrade now.”

The vulnerabilities being addressed may include one found in IE8 running on Windows XP machines that was dealt with yesterday by a hot-fix patch issued separately to deal with a zero-day attack that was actually being exploited in the wild against U.S. government agencies, Henry says. The same vulnerabilities are rated only moderate for machines running server rather than desktop operating systems.

“The patch will include fixes for other, less critical remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting Office and Lync,” says Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development for Tripwire. “These important vulnerabilities run the gamut, impacting DoS, spoofing, elevation of privilege and information disclosure.”

A second bulleting deals with another IE vulnerability believed to be one disclosed in March at the annual Pwn2Own hacking competition. It raised some eyebrows when the problem was not dealt with on Patch Tuesday last month. “Usually Microsoft releases Pwn2Own bug fixes in April, but this year other bug fixes must have been higher priority,” says Andrew Storms, director of security operations for Tripwire.

The rest of this month’s 10 bulletins are ranked important, a step down from critical, and like the two critical ones, three others address problems that can lead to remote code execution exploits. They affect mainly Office “The most widely installed is probably Bulletin 7, which is for Word 2003 and Word Viewer,” says Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys. “Bulletin 6 covers the Microsoft Publisher included in Office 2003, 2007 and 2010, and Bulletin 5 is for Microsoft’s instant messaging modules – Communicator 2007 and Lync 2010.”

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Also, a Windows 8 tablet for less than $400 is a natural for BYOD

Windows 8 is Microsoft’s best effort to catch up with Apple and grab tablet sales away from the iPad by including things iPads just don’t have, according to Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

These things include keyboards and Microsoft Office, Gates says in an interview with CNBC. “With Windows 8 Microsoft is trying to gain share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device,” Gates says.

He says Windows 8 was designed to wrap PCs into a tablet form, as exemplified by Microsoft’s own Windows 8 hardware Surface PRO and Surface RT.

“So if you have Surface, Surface PRO you’ve got that portability of the tablet but richness — in terms of the keyboard, Microsoft Office — of a PC,” he says. “So as you say PCs are a big market. It’s going to be harder and harder to distinguish products whether they’re tablets or PCs.”

Microsoft sees customers are unsatisfied by limitations of pure tablets with touchscreens and no support for Office. “A lot of those users are frustrated,” Gates says. “They can’t type, they can’t create documents, they don’t have Office there so we’re providing something with the benefits they’ve seen that have made [tablets] a big category but without giving up what they expect in a PC.”
Small, cheap Acer tablet

A product listing for a rumored Acer mini tablet popped up briefly on Amazon.com last week for the surprisingly low price of $379.99 before the item was taken down.

But the specifications listed for the device indicate that it can support a full-blown PC version of Windows 8 on an 8.1-inch tablet.

The low price makes them attractive to consumers and increases the possibility that Windows 8 devices will become a factor in BYOD programs. At the same time these small tablets become more attractive to businesses because they can support all legacy applications that run on Windows 7 including the full version of Microsoft Office.

A separate version of Windows 8 — Windows RT — is designed for tablets that are based on ARM processors, but they only run Windows Store applications and a truncated version of Office. Windows RT devices also can’t join domains.

The Acer product in question is the W3-810-1600, pictured below in a photo that was posted two weeks ago by the French website minimachines.net but taken down at Acer’s request.

The screen resolution is 1280×800 pixels is the low end of minimum requirements for Windows 8 devices set by Microsoft, according to specifications posted by The Verge.

While it’s OK to build devices to that spec, it’s not without ramifications. The devices can’t support snap screens, which is a feature that displays two applications at once — one small and one large — and to reverse which one is bigger with a simple touchscreen swipe.

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Beware of e-mails that play down the ease of cracking your leaked passcode.

Reputation.com, a service that helps people and companies manage negative search results, has suffered a security breach that has exposed user names, e-mail and physical addresses, and in some cases, password data.

In an e-mail sent to users on Tuesday, officials with the Redwood City, California-based company said the passwords were “highly encrypted (‘salted’ and ‘hashed’),” a highly vague description that can mean different things to different people. “Although it was highly unlikely that these passwords could ever be decrypted, we immediately changed the password of every user to prevent any possible unauthorized account access,” the e-mail added unconvincingly.

It’s unfortunate that companies make such assurances, because they may give users a false sense of security. As Ars has been reporting for nine months, gains in cracking techniques means the average password has never been weaker, allowing attackers to decipher even long passwords with numbers, letters, and symbols in them. Even Ars’ own Nate Anderson—a self-described newbie to password cracking—was able to crack more than 45 percent of a 17,000-hash list using software and dictionaries he downloaded online.

Jeremi Gosney, a password cracking expert with Stricture Consulting Group recently explained in an Ars forum post that it’s highly unusual for a leaked password list to go uncracked, as suggested by the Reputation.com e-mail.

“It definitely depends on the specific leak we’re talking about, but generally speaking, your average security expert/penetration tester/casual password cracker is probably only going to be able to recover at most 50-60% of passwords in any given leak,” he wrote. “Seasoned password crackers will likely recover 70-75%; and truly exceptional password crackers will recover 80% or more.”

Adding cryptographic salt to passwords is crucial to the safe storage of passwords because it forces password cracking programs to guess the plaintext for each individual hash, rather than guessing passwords for thousands or millions of hashes all at once. (Yes, it also thwarts rainbow-table attacks, but no one uses this method anymore.) But it’s easy to overstate the benefits of salting. It in no way slows down the cracking of a single hash, so if an attacker locates the hash belonging to a particular high-value Reputation.com user, the measure does nothing to thwart the cracking of that hash. The security value of salting alone only slows down cracking of large lists by a multiple of the number of unique salts, so that value decreases with each hash that is decoded.

A far more meaningful security measure is the type of algorithm that’s used to convert plaintext passwords into cryptographic hashes. If the company used SHA1, SHA3, MD5, or any number of other “fast” hashes, it’s extremely likely that at least some of the leaked password data has already been cracked. If, on the other hand, the company used bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2 or another “slow” algorithm specifically designed to hash passwords, the chances are significantly lower. Reputation.com makes no mention of the algorithm it used, so users should presume the worst. Anyone who used their Reputation.com password to protect one or more accounts on other sites should change those passcodes immediately. Passwords should be randomly generated by a password-manager, contain a minimum length of 11 characters, and include numbers, letters, and symbols. They should also be unique to each site.

For a deeper dive into the benefits of salting and hashing, see last Saturday’s story about the password breach that hit LivingSocial.com. Some of the user comments are especially illuminating.

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The Microsoft service is available in the U.K. this week, the rest of the world this summer

Microsoft is rolling Skype in with its free Outlook.com email service, giving customers the ability to fire up VoIP calls directly from their mail inbox.

Within weeks the Skype for Outlook.com will be available in the U.S. and Germany, but for now is just deploying in the U.K., according to the Skype Big Blog. It will be available worldwide this summer.

The new Skype service includes both audio and video calls, so together Skype and Outlook.com will support voice, video, email and instant messaging.

The Outlook.com version of Skype requires a browser plugin for Internet Explorer, Chrome or Firefox, but it must be the latest version of each. Using customers’ Microsoft accounts, they connect Skype to Outlook.com.

Those who already have a Skype account have to manually connect it to their Microsoft account, which merges Skype and Outlook.com contacts.

Once Skype has been added to the account, Skype audio and video call buttons appear in the same window with IM chats. If a user is reading email and wants to call the sender, the user mouses over the picture of the sender that appears with the email and left clicks on the appropriate Skype button to set up the call.

Skype for Outlook.com is part of a larger effort of integrating Skype with existing Microsoft platforms. It is already integrated with the Microsoft Lync unified communication platform for voice calls, instant messaging interoperability and shared presence information.

The company promised in February to integrate Skype video calls in Lync within a year so that customers making calls on Windows Phone 8 devices can connect via Skype.

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At Microsoft’s developer conference, Steve Ballmer talked ecosystem, not tech.

It’s day one of Microsoft BUILD, the company’s major developer conference. Traditionally at these things (this is only the second BUILD, but before it there were almost 20 years of PC conferences that served a similar purpose) the keynote presentations are developer-heavy. The speakers tend to talk about Microsoft’s latest developer tools and operating system platforms, do some programming live on stage (always a crowd-pleaser), and show off new testing and source control features—playing to the audience.

But today was different. BUILD’s opening keynote was presented by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. Ballmer was in top form. Thanks to certain videos, the man’s presentation style has developed a certain reputation: over-confident, volume cranked up to 11, bombastic, and, it must be said, sweaty.

Today, he was none of that. He was composed, funny, natural, and overall tremendously likable. He was, as always, excited about the products Microsoft is delivering, but where sometimes that excitement comes across as almost scary, today it was infectious enthusiasm.

Steve Ballmer is plainly a person who believes very strongly in the products that Microsoft has built, namely the recently-released Windows 8 and Surface and the imminently available Windows Phone 8. He believes in the underlying vision, and today, in his keynote, that’s what he was selling to the thousands of assembled developers in a giant tent on Microsoft’s campus, and many thousands more watching streams online.

The vision once had a name—”three screens and a cloud”—but that terminology appears to have been left on the scrapheap of history alongside the term “Metro”. Even without this name, that is the vision that Ballmer was selling. Three Microsoft platforms: the PC/tablet (because for Redmond, the latter is just one kind of the former), the smartphone, and the TV-connected console-cum-media player. All three are unified with a common design and aesthetic, have a (somewhat) similar development platform, and are tied together with cloud services.

That vision still isn’t fully realized, but it is manifest today in a way that it never has been before. This is Microsoft’s platform, this is Microsoft’s future, and what it needs from developers is simple: it needs them to buy into the platform and develop applications. It needs new applications, Metro-style applications, for Windows 8 and for Windows Phone 8.

Ballmer’s job today was to sell that platform to developers. He had to get them engaged and excited, and most important of all, to convince them that the audience is there; he had to convince them that if they built their apps, there would be tens and hundreds of millions of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 users to buy them. Build the apps and the customers will come.

How will Microsoft get those customers? A range of hardware spanning any usage scenario, from 10-inch tablets to 82-inch monster touchscreens including touch-screen Ultrabooks, all-in-one family PCs, and even powerful workstations, is a good start. This, coupled with a saturation marketing campaign, will be all but unavoidable.

For Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is betting big on Windows 8. With its common look-and-feel, the company is counting on Windows Phone 8 being the natural smartphone choice for Windows 8 users. Windows Phone 8 will be the smartphone that feels familiar to Windows 8 users, and thanks to cloud services like SkyDrive and Xbox Music Pass, it’s the phone that will be best integrated and best connected.

Will developers respond? The response at BUILD was enthusiastic, but this is arguably to be expected. At BUILD, there’s a certain degree of preaching to the choir—you don’t generally attend a Microsoft developer event unless you’re invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. The real test will be in coming months, when we’ll see if developers are taking Redmond’s platform seriously from the apps they produce. And the onus is also on the software giant to deliver the users it promised. Microsoft has built it, so will they come?

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However, NASA is not the first group to launch Nexus Ones into space.

NASA on Monday launched three 2010-vintage Nexus One smartphones into orbit via an Antares rocket, saying that the Android devices would be among the cheapest satellites ever devised.

The devices are part of the administration’s PhoneSat program, which is designed to ascertain the suitability of consumer smartphone processors as cheaper satellite brains.

Michael Gazarik, NASA associate administrator for space technology, said in a statement that there’s no shortage of possible applications for the space-going Android phones.

“Smartphones offer a wealth of potential capabilities for flying small, low-cost, powerful satellites for atmospheric or Earth science, communications, or other space-born applications. They also may open space to a whole new generation of commercial, academic and citizen-space

The devices contain much of the hardware needed for basic satellite functionality, including reasonably modern processors, cameras, GPS receivers, radios and a host of other small sensors.

The phones are housed in four-inch cubesat structures, and will attempt to take photos of the Earth via their onboard cameras.

The PhoneSats are also part of an elaborate game, as they transmit packets of data back to Earth, where they can be received by amateur radio operators. While some packets are simple status reports, others are tiny fragments of the Earth pictures being captured from orbit, which can be reassembled into complete photographs.

Interestingly, however, NASA is not the first to undertake this type of project – a privately-held British company called Surrey Satellite Technology Limited launched a Nexus One into space aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s PSLV-C20 mission in late February. However, the STRaND-1’s price tag – “about as much as a high-end family car,” according to SSTL – is likely significantly higher than NASA’s PhoneSat, which cost less than $7,000.

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Windows 8 Update: transition from Android to Windows Phone made easier
Also, iPad keyboard/cover to rival Surface, 8-inch Windows 8 tablet

UPDATE: Microsoft has delayed availability of its Switch to Windows Phone app until sometime next week.

Microsoft figures customers will be more likely to switch from Android smartphones to Windows 8 phones if it makes it easier to find the same or similar apps for their new phone as were on their old phones.

Microsoft is introducing Switch to Windows Phone, an application that finds identical or replacement applications for Windows Phone 8 in the Windows Store to replace their old Android apps.

The new application, which is being released today, is not available for iPhones.
Switch to Windows 8 inventories all the applications on the Android phone and sends that inventory to the Microsoft SkyDrive cloud. When customers log in to the same SkyDrive account from the Switch to Windows 8 app loaded on their Windows Phone 8, the app finds the same set of applications. If there are no exact replacements, the app recommends similar ones, according to Guru Gowrappan, executive vice president for products at application search firm Quixey.

Quixey supplies the apps-search engine within Switch to Windows 8. The engine uses descriptions of apps, reviews of apps, trouble reports about apps and other metadata it gathers from the Web to recommend substitute applications to users, Gowrappan says. The goal is to make them as close as possible to matching the app on the Android phone.

In the case of Switch to Windows 8, the Quixey search engine goes through the 135,000 Windows Phone 8 applications in the Windows Store seeking direct matches – such as the Windows Phone 8 Facebook app to replace the Android Facebook app – or to find applications that perform as close to the same function as possible, he says.

The search engine can also look for applications based on what customers want to do. So a customer could enter “cook Italian food” into the engine and would get a list of apps such as Tuscan Chef and Italian Video Recipes.

Sprint Zone and Sprint Digital Lounge use Quixey’s engine to find apps as does ask.com for searching Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry applications.

Keyboard for iPads mimics Surface
Logitech is selling a thin, fabric-covered keyboard/cover for iPads that give the Apple tablets similar functionality to Microsoft’s Windows 8 Surface tablet/laptops.

Called FabricSkin Keyboard Folio, the keyboards attach magnetically to iPads and flop down to convert from being a cover to being a keyboard. The device includes a prop to hold the screen at a slant for better viewing when typing. It can also fold over to allow use of the iPad as a tablet.

At $150, that puts iPads with keyboards on a price par with some models of Surface tablets with keyboards.

Some differences: Surface supports Office applications and a file system, something iPads lack. Surface draws power from the computer battery; FabricSkin Keyboard Folio has its own rechargeable battery. The Surface keyboard communicates with the tablet via direct electrical connection; FabricSkin Keyboard Folio uses Bluetooth.

8-inch Windows 8 tablet
Acer is coming out with an 8-inch tablet running Windows 8 if a leaked photo is to be believed.
Windows 8
The photo here was posted by the site minimachines.net but taken down at Acer’s request.

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QUESTION 1
You work as a database developer at Certkingdom.com. You need to plan a SQL Server 2008 database
that will be accessed by mobile users.
The database must be able to profile data before importing it from heterogeneous data sources,
including Microsoft Office Excel, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, and
CSV files. In addition, Certkingdom.com’s mobile users must have collaboration and offline capabilities
and they must be able to use heterogeneous data stores.
How should you plan your database if you want your design to use the least amount of
administrative effort?

A. You should make use of the Analysis Services and the Notification Services.
B. You should make use of the SQL Server Agent.
C. You should make use of the Integration Services and the Microsoft Sync Framework.
D. You should make use of the Service Broker and SQL Mail.

Answer: C

QUESTION 2
Certkingdom.com has hired you to design a SQL Server 2008 database for its online retail application. The
database must be able to run both Transact-SQL statements as well as SQL Server Integration
Services (SSIS) packages. Certkingdom.com plans on running scheduled maintenance tasks on the
database and they want the database to send alerts and notifications to the network
administrators.
How should you design this database?

A. You should make use of the Analysis Services and the Notification Services.
B. You should make use of the Reporting Services.
C. You should make use of SQL Server Agent.
D. You should make use of the Service Broker and the Notification Services.

Answer: C

QUESTION 3
Certkingdom.com hires you as their database administrator of their SQL Server 2008 database
infrastructure. You need to optimize a very large database table for query execution against string
data. The database contains several million rows of data. You need to ensure that the queries are
performed in order of proximity and are completed in the least amount of time possible.
How should you configure the database?

A. You should create a partitioned view on the table.
B. You should create a nonclustered index on the table.
C. You should make use of the Analysis Services.
D. You should enable Full-Text-Search.

Answer: D

QUESTION 4
You work as a database developer at Certkingdom.com. You need to design a SQL Server 2008 database
named Sales. The Sales database will have tables named Customers with an identity column
named CustomerID, Products with and identity column named ProductID, SalesReps with an
identity column named RepID, Orders with an identity column named OrderID, and Invoices with
an identity column named InvoiceID.
Sales representatives are assigned to specific customers with each Sales Representative being
assigned to more than one customer.
You need to ensure that the database is normalized and that it represents the relationship
between the Sales Representatives and the customers.
How should you design your database?

A. You should create a foreign key constraint between the SalesReps and Customers tables.
B. You should make use of the hierarchyid data type on the SalesReps table.
C. You should add a SalesRep2Customer table with foreign key constraints to the SalesReps and
Customers tables.
D. You should make use of a table-valued function on the SalesReps table.
E. You should make use of a view based on the SalesReps and Customers tables.

Answer: C

Explanation:

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