Top Five New Features in SQL Server 2012


Top Five New Features in SQL Server 2012



Microsoft recently released the first Community Technical Preview (CTP) of the newest version of SQL Server, code-named Denali.  Three years after the release of SQL Server 2008, this new version of the popular database platform promises several exciting new features.

1. SQL Server AlwaysOn Technology

The new High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) features of Denali will offer a vast improvement over the database mirroring capabilities of SQL Server 2008.  AlwaysOn allows you to create availability groups of databases that can be failed over simultaneously.  This is especially important when you wish to fail over interdependent applications that rely upon more than one database.  AlwaysOn also allows you to create active secondary servers, making use of the redundant databases for part of your read workload.

2. Ad Hoc Query Paging

The ad hoc query paging enhancements to TSQL add the OFFSET and FETCH keywords to the ORDER BY clause, allowing you to specify the number of rows you wish to retrieve from a long result set and page through those results in a manner specified in the query.

3. Column Based Query Accelerator

This one’s still wrapped in a bit of mystery, but it appears to be an enhancement designed to speed up data warehouse query performance.  Here’s a quote from Microsoft: “Column-Based Query Accelerator will help dramatically improve query performance ~10x and reduce performance tuning through interactive experiences with data for near instant response times and streamlined setup which removes the need to build summary aggregates.”

4. FileTable

The FileTable is a neat bridge between databases and the operating system allowing database users to directly access unstructured data stored in the Windows file system.  Each FileTable uses a predefined schema to access a hierarchy of directories and files stored in the file system.  Each row in the FileTable corresponds to a single directory or file in the file system.  Files can be modified either through SQL Server or through Windows and updates are reflected in both places.

5. Business Intelligence: Project Crescent

The results of Microsoft’s Project Crescent are included in Denali.  This new technology, based upon Silverlight, allows business users unprecedented access to interact with business intelligence data.  Crescent takes the business intelligence technology that PowerPivot brought to Excel and extends it to the browser with some great enhancements, including data storyboarding that can be exported to PowerPoint.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SSRS Report Design: Best Practices

Introduction Microsoft® SQL Server™ Reporting Services is a comprehensive reporting tool. In using Reporting Services, you can design and deliver a wide range of reports, from simple tables to online free-form reports with graphical items and interactive links. Reporting Services can render reports for a variety of client-viewing formats, including HTML, PDF, Excel, and image formats. The wide variety of options and choices can be problematic for report authors who must make numerous decisions when choosing how to lay out a report. This paper provides a few guidelines to make these decisions easier and answers common questions.
Read more

SSAS OLAP Design - Best Practices

Introduction This paper outlines the recommended best practices for designing OLAP databases in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services to better meet the functional and performance needs of users. Designing a database for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) databases is very different from designing a database for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and requires a different approach for achieving optimal results. The best practices recommendations are grouped into the following sections: Data Source Design Best Practices Dimension Design Best Practices Cube Design Best Practices Partition Design Best Practices Aggregation Design Best Practices Within each section, these best practices are ordered roughly by priority, where priority is a combination of how important the best practice is and how often you must worry about it. Major topics not covered include best practices for the design of calculations and for server management and operations.  These two topics are s...
Read more

Enable Usage-Based Optimization in SSAS

Usage-Based Optimization is a fantastic feature in SSAS to improve the most frequently used MDX queries of any cube database. This feature is used to design aggregations based on actual user queries using Business Intelligence Development Studio. But when ever you try to design  Usage-Based Optimization  you might have seen all the options  disabled.  This uses the technique of creating aggregations on FREQUENTLY USED queries in the given time interval.  We can enable the options in Usage-Based Optimization wizard. Connect to SSAS using SSMS (Sql Server Management Studio). Right click on the server and select properties as shown below. set CreateQueryLogTable to  true. Set the value of  QueryLogConnectionString  to any database where you wish to store your queries. Set the value of  QueryLogSampling  to the appropriate value for your environment (the default value of 10 means every 10th query will be logged). The lowe...
Read more