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Saturday 2 November 2013

SQL Server 2014 Summary Links #3



SQl Server 2014 Product Guide
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=39269
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/4/F/84F00BE4-DAFE-4BA4-92AC-5D1080127984/SQL_Server_2014_CTP1_Product_Guide.zip

Tuesday 17 September 2013

SQL Server 2014 Summary Links #2


SQL Server 2014 Features Summary
Performance
Several new features have been introduced to improve database performance.
  • In-Memory OLTP. This is a new feature which can help resolve issues in high concurrency situations. There are some requirements to get it working but for those whose problem this solves, it is very cool.
  • Updatable ColumnStore Indexes. This provides the ability to load or delete data from existing ColumnStore indexes. Previously once a ColumnStore index was created you could not directly add, delete, or modify data in the table. In order to update table information the index needed to be dropped or disabled and then the index rebuilt.
    Now updatable with greater data compression for more real-time analytics support.
  • Buffer Pool Extension to Solid State Drives (SSDs). This is new functionality providing the ability of each node to have its own SSD or SSD Array for buffering, and thus performance capabilities can be greatly increased.
  • Resource Management. Along with CPU and Memory management which were already available in SQL Server, SQL Server 2014 adds the ability to control the IO usage for a resource pool.
  • Improved Query Performance. Another new feature for performance improvement wherein query processing has been enhanced and split into a two-step process: decision making and execution.

Scalability & High Availability
  • AlwaysOn Secondaries. Provides for up-to eight secondaries (double the 2012 option).
  • More Reliable Secondaries. Previously several factors could result in secondaries being dropped offline. Those areas have been addressed.
  • Scale to the Cloud. SQL 2014 allows for Hybrid systems as you can now use Azure VMs as AlwaysOn AG replicas. Starting with SQL Server 2012 Cumulative Update 2, you've been able to back up your databases to the Windows Azure Binary Large Object Storage Service. However, SQL Server 2014 has introduced the concept of Smart Backups, in which SQL Server automatically determines whether full or differential backups should be performed and when they should be performed. SQL Server 2014 also lets you store the data and log files associated with an on-premises database in Azure's storage. In addition, SQL Server Management Studio provides a deployment wizard that lets you easily migrate your existing on-premises databases to an Azure virtual machine (VM). Point and click user interface built into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to help customers easily deploy existing SQL Server databases into Windows Azure Virtual Machine. SQL Server 2014 has also added the ability to use an Azure VM as an AlwaysOn availability group replica. Introduced in SQL Server 2012, the Availability Groups feature provides failover services that can support highly available databases. The structure consists of a primary replica and one to four secondary replicas (up to eight in SQL Server 2014). The primary replica can host one or more databases; the secondary replicas contain copies of those databases. The Windows Azure Infrastructure Services now supports Availability Groups in Azure VMs when SQL Server is running. That means you can set up the VM as a secondary replica in order to support automatic failover.
  • Enhanced separation of duties – Achieve greater compliance with new capabilities for creating role and sub-roles. For example, a database administrator can now manage data without seeing sensitive data or personally identifiable information.
  • Greater scalability of compute, networking and storage with Windows Server 2012 R2 - SQL Server 2014 CTP1 supports Windows Server 2012 R2 CTP, so you can start to test the scalability gains Windows Server 2012 R2 provides for SQL Server:
    Increased compute scale – Continue to benefit from scale for up to 640 logical processors and 4TB of memory in a physical environment and up to 64 virtual processors and 1TB of memory per VM.  Network virtualization and NIC teaming – Abstracts networking layer so you can easily migrate SQL Server from one datacenter to another. Increase network throughput for your mission critical SQL Server workloads by allowing those workloads to access more than one network card. Storage virtualization with storage spaces – Create pools of storage and storage tiers allowing your hot data to access the premium storage and cold data to access standard storage improving resilience, performance and predictability.
  • Improved Backup Options
    Backup to Azure. With this new feature of backup to Azure, backups can be stored offsite (in the cloud) providing safe storage of backup data.
    Smart Backup to Azure. Another new backup feature is Smart Backups. With Smart Backups SQL Server determines whether a full or incremental backup is needed and backs up accordingly to Azure.   

Business Intelligence features

  • Power BI for Office 365. Previous add-on options Data Explorer and Geoflow have been integrated into the BI Suite and have been renamed as Power Query (Data Explorer) and Power Map (Geoflow).
  • Power Query enables users to pull in information from the web or external sources and merge it with local data, providing for an easier method for enriching your internal data.
  • Power Map provides enhanced mapping capabilities and the ability to interact with any .geographic data you may have. Power View for Multi-Dimensional Models - Support for PowerView for the multi-dimensional format within the BI Semantic Model in SQL Server Analysis Services.

Monday 16 September 2013

SQL Server 2012 Features Link#2 @ ms.com




Built-in mission critical capabilities Availability / Performance & Scalability/Security
  • Reduced downtime with SQL Server AlwaysOn. Greater availability with multiple secondaries; Improve IT cost efficiency and performance using up to four Active Secondary. Enhance SQL Server failover clustering and support multi-site clustering across subnet to enable cross-datacenter failover of SQL Server instances. Achieve increased hardware utilization and performance using Always On Active Secondaries. Improve performance by redirecting reporting workloads, utilizing secondary hardware, and freeing up capacity on the primary hardware. Improve capacity utilization on the secondary hardware by offloading backup jobs to the Active Secondary. Seamlessly restore backups run on multiple secondaries using the Database Recovery Advisor. Significantly reduce downtime during patching and upgrades using the rolling upgrade capabilities in AlwaysOn. Bring applications online faster during planned failover with failover time within seconds instead of hours.

  • Reduce the number of OS patches required by running SQL Server on Windows Server Core.

  • Uptime during maintenance with enhanced online operation. Support for reindexing of LOB columns and the addition of non-null columns as online operations.

  • Gain insights and proactively identify issues using System Center Advisor. Simulate what a live data environment looks like using Distributed Replay, in order to accurately assess realistic data traffic and load that happens during real-world testing. SQL Server Upgrade Advisor/ SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA)./ Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit,

  • 10-100x query performance gains with xVelocity in-memory column store index for data warehousing. Blazing-fast queries with Full-Text Search enhancements. More predictable performance with Resource Governor.  Apply the new column store index to most data warehousing queries with no application changes required. Interactively explore 10's of billions of rows of data using xVelocity in-memory analytics engine for business intelligence. Resource Governor brings more performance assurance and scale by increasing the maximum number of resource pools to 64 (from 20). Enhancements also allow affinity of resource pools to CPU schedulers and NUMA nodes. Use Policy-Based Management to create policies for proactively managing entities on the server. Accelerate performance of I/O intensive workloads and cut growing volumes of data ~50-60%¹ with enterprise-grade compression capabilities. More easily manage large data volumes for large sliding windows scenarios with applications like SAP via support for up to 15k partitions. Improve the relevance of search results with new statistical semantic search which quickly delivers statistically relevant results. Expand data warehouses with built-in database features like Remote Blob Storage and partitioned tables that scale to 15,000 partitions. Scale out heavily accessed databases while better maintaining consistency with Peer-to-Peer Replication. Improve scalability and performance of large workloads and consolidation scenarios with up to 320 logical processors and 4TB of memory with Windows Server 2012.  Allowing SQL Server virtual machines to use up to 64 virtual processors and 1 TB of memory.

  • Easily manage permissions around data access with User-Defined Server Roles. Increase manageability and decrease complexity of database schema through Default Schema for Groups. Control database access to deployed applications while improving manageability through Contained Database Authentication. Help ensure compliance and increase manageability related to auditing with audit resilience, filtering, and user-defined audit. Built upon advanced security features (Transparent Data Encryption, Extensible Key Management, Kerberos authentication, and Policy-Based Management).



Enable breakthrough insights
  • Enterprise-ready Big Data solutions.  Power View, Power Pivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010. SQL Server 2012 Predictive Analytics combined with the simplicity and familiarity of Excel provide a highly advanced data mining solution. Gain near real time reports and rapid query performance for reporting queries with fast data replication and creation of auto statistics.  Improve application uptime with support for reindexing of LOB columns and the addition of non-null columns as online operations. Achieve seamless redirection of reporting applications to a new secondary one using read-only routing in the event of a failure.

  • Quickly generate reports using intuitive interfaces and extend reporting to the cloud with Windows Azure SQL Reporting. Simplify the process of building complex solutions with consistent BI Semantic Model. Empower BI application developers to have flexibility and balance in performance, scale, in-memory, and pass-through query usage. Use the xVelocity in-memory analytics engine to empower users to interact with an unprecedented amount of data at the speed of thought. Build applications by using predictive programming by take advantage of XMLA, Data Mining extensions, ADOMD.NET, OLE DB, and Analysis Management objects. Customize algorithms and visualizations by using procedures, predictive model markup language, algorithms, and visualizations. Use predictive KPIs via integration of Analysis Services and SharePoint server and discovering attributes that influence KPIs. Extract quality data by using in-flight mining for ETL data loads.  Access data from virtually any source. Easily collaborate and share insight using Power Pivot. Data mashup capabilities. All of the above capabilities available out of the box in Excel 2013. Power BI for Office 365 preview: Get complete self-service BI for your on-premises and cloud-based data by using the new data discovery and analysis features in Excel with the collaboration capabilities in the new Power BI for Office 365 online service.

  • BIGDATA. Analyze Hadoop data with familiar tools, and at the same time enrich your information by connecting to the world’s data and services. Leverage Power Pivot and Power View for Big Data. Access the world’s data with Windows Azure Marketplace. Scale on demand in the private and public cloud. HDInsight is Microsoft’s 100% Apache compatible Hadoop distribution, supported by Microsoft. HDInsight, available both on Windows Server or as an Windows Azure service, empowers organizations with new insights on previously untouched unstructured data, while connecting to the most widely used Business Intelligence (BI) tools on the planet. . HDInsight provides simplicity, ease of management, and an open Enterprise-ready Hadoop service that runs on premise or in the cloud. Combine your relational and non-relational data with the new PolyBase available in SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse.  HDInsights enables you to realize new value in the data you have and can combine these new insights with 3rd party datasets simply and elegantly. Microsoft Big Data offers an integrated platform for managing data of any type or size, whether it is structured data from a relational data warehouse such as SQL Server 2012 Parallel Data Warehouse, unstructured data on Hadoop or streaming data. Leverage the benefits of Microsoft HDInsight that offers 100% compatibility with Apache Hadoop. Connect Hadoop to the World via Windows Azure Marketplace. Integrate a range of data mining tools from the Open Source Community, such as Mahout and R. 100% Apache Hadoop compatible Big Data implementation.  Microsoft support of HDInsight on Windows Server and Windows Azure. Simplified deployment and ease of manageability with System Center 2012 or Windows Azure. Elegant connectivity to Microsoft Office Excel 2013 and Business Intelligence tools.

  • Streaming data. Process large event volumes of data across multiple data streams. Gain continuous insight through historical data mining. Contain development costs by utilizing existing skill sets. Reduce management complexity with Microsoft’s easy-to-support platform. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/streaming-data.aspx With StreamInsight, enterprises can make informed business decisions nearly instantaneously. Gain Business Insight through KPIs StreamInsight helps management make better business decisions through historical data mining and continuous insights. StreamInsight query debugger identifies, fixes, and tests problems quickly while flexible deployment options scale processing needs and meet diverse processing requirements.  StreamInsight query debugger identifies, fixes, and tests problems quickly while flexible deployment options scale processing needs and meet diverse processing requirements.

Cloud on your terms

  • Hybrid IT opportunities with a common architecture that spans traditional servers, appliances and the cloud. Windows Azure, SQL Database Data Sync, a cloud service that provides bi-directional data synchronization between databases across datacenter and cloud. DataFeed using OData, an open protocol built on widely used web standards. Optimized productivity with SQL Server Data Tools - write once, run anywhere. Extend any data, anywhere with DataSync and Odata. Optimizing SQL Server 2012 for Private Cloud. Pool SQL Server databases using Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V for efficient use of computer, network, and storage.  Make your databases and supporting infrastructure elastic to efficiently meet demand with SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012. Build in Self-Service capabilities for the provisioning of databases using System Center 2012 with SQL Server 2012. Make IT strategic to your organization by implementing a usage based tracking model for consumption of resources with System    Center 2012.  Public Cloud -Build and Deploy Applications Quickly  Rapidly build departmental business solutions. Extend data to the cloud to enable collaboration.  Build software-as-a-service applications. Create custom scalable web applications. SQL Server in new persistent Windows Azure Virtual Machines which allows you to migrate existing on-premises SQL Server applications to Windows Azure without modifying the application; Develop and Test new on-premises SQL Server applications quickly and cost effectively; Back and Restore existing on-premises SQL Server applications to Windows Azure; and Extend existing on-premises SQL Server applicationsZ to SQL Server application running in Windows Azure Virtual Machine. For more information on how to buy on SQL Database pricing, click here. Windows Azure SQL Database service. Develop new cloud designed applications that are dynamically scalable and have built-in HA full managed platform and infrastructure solution, simply focus on application development with this service. Based on SQL Server technologies, use familiar SQL Server development and management tools. Extend on-premises SQL Server applications to Windows Azure SQL Database service. For more on Cloud data management offerings, click here. Develop for major platforms, such as C++, .NET, Java and PHP.  Deploy middle-tier applications on heterogeneous platforms that deliver rich connectivity across non-Windows environments, such as Linux.  Simplify the development, deployment, and management of database applications across on-premises and in the cloud.  Simplify complex programming tasks with T-SQL enhancements and improved support for ANSI SQL standards.  Deploy across on-premises and the Windows Azure public cloud. Develop and manage using common, integrated tools, such as SQL Server Data Tools and SQL Server Management Studio. Build powerful hybrid cloud solutions, so that applications and databases can span both on-site and public cloud resources. Synchronizing databases across on-site and the Windows Azure public cloud using SQL Azure Data Sync. Easily migrate databases from on-premises to the Windows Azure SQL Database public cloud using the Windows Azure Import Export Service.  Gain SQL Server and SQL Azure access from any Java application using the latest JDBC Driver for SQL Server. Learn more. Take advantage of the Microsoft PHP Driver for SQL Server version 3.0, including Buffered Queries and SQL Server AlwaysOn. Learn more. Allow C and C++ applications to leverage the standard ODBC API and connect to SQL Server 2012 using the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux. Learn more.  Provide greater flexibility for database admins and developers who have applications that run on Linux and co-exist in SQL Server. Streamline the development and management of database applications on-site and the public cloud with new Data Tier Application Framework. Database Developer Productivity. Build database applications in one package including a powerful Microsoft Visual Studio IDE with new SQL Server Data Tools. Enhanced interoperability with a wide variety of programming languages including the .NET Framework, Java, PHP and C/C++ on Linux.  Author a database in SQL Server Data Tools and then build the database into a DACPAC for handoff to a DBA with the Data-tier Application Framework.  Build feature-rich applications with new Programmability features and enhanced T-SQL features. Next Generation Applications. Improve content management and search with FILESTREAM enhancements. Store content easily within FILESTREAM blob storage with standard tools and applications with new FileTable.  Build location-aware applications with Spatial Data Types. Enable developers to redistribute a free embedded database with desktop applications and tools with a new Local Database Runtime (LocalDb) deployment option. Enable rich full text search and new semantic search capabilities. Whether building cloud applications or hybrid applications that consume both on-site and cloud services, the Windows Azure Platform offers powerful database and BI functionality backed by common tools with SQL Server 2012. Rich Deployment Options  Extend heterogeneous environments by connecting SQL Server and Windows Azure SQL Database applications using standard APIs across varied plaforms. Optimize for Windows Server and High Aailability with new SQL Server AlwaysOn. Reduced patching surface area with support for Windows Server Core.  Virtualize SQL Server and consolidate hardware with Hyper-V virtualization.
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