Get Started with the SQL Server 2014 CTP1 and BI

At TechEd North America we announced Microsoft SQL Server 2014 as part of a wave of updates to our key enterprise products. During TechEd Europe, we announced the availability of the first public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2014. This public CTP enables you to try and test many of the capabilities of the SQL Server 2014 release. See the SQL Server teams, “SQL Server 2014 – Public CTP Now Available” blog post for more detail and what is in the CTP.  Here are a few of the high level goals:

SQL Server 2014 delivers:

• Mission critical performance across all database workloads with in-memory for online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing and business intelligence built-in as well as greater scale and availability.
• Hybrid cloud platform enabling organizations to more easily build, deploy and manage database solutions that span on-premises and cloud.
• Faster insights from any data with a complete BI solution using familiar tools like Excel.

There were several blog posts published during TechEd Europe 2013 that go into some depth on the features.  Here are some we thought you should read when you get a few free minutes:

• SQL Server 2014 In-Memory Technologies: Blog Series Introduction – this is first of several blog posts to come that will go deep on project “Hekaton”.   In-memory OLTP is a new database engine optimized for memory resident data and OLTP workloads.
• Getting Started with SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP - With this post we are giving you a brief introduction to the new syntax for in-memory OLTP, and will show you how to get started with T-SQL and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).
• AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2014 CTP1 - AlwaysOn encompasses the SQL Server solutions for mission-critical high availability and disaster recovery. Two solutions were included under the AlwaysOn umbrella in SQL Server 2012: Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances. Each solution has different characteristics, making them appropriate for different scenarios, and both can be combined in the same deployment.  This blog post goes into detail on both more fully.
• Microsoft Discusses Big Data at Hadoop Summit 2013 - Hortonworks and Yahoo! kicked of the sixth annual Hadoop Summit last week in San Jose, the leading conference for the Apache Hadoop community. We were on the ground discussing our big data strategy with attendees and showcasing HDInsight Service, our Hadoop-based distribution for Windows Azure, as well as our latest business intelligence (BI) tools.
• ‘Wicked Fast’–Real World Experience with SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP - During last week’s announcements Quentin Clark highlighted how Edgenet were using In-Memory OLTP to gain real-time access to retail product data with in-memory OLTP. At TechEd Europe, it’s a timely reminder to look back to a story we highlighted first at PASS Summit 2012, in which bwin announced the benefits that they were gaining from using In-Memory OLTP – at that time, still under its codename ‘Project Hekaton’.

Interested in checking this out for yourself?  Go get all of the products previews in the Evaluation Center.  Be sure and stay tuned right here for more information on SQL Server and BI.

Written by Keith Combs, Server and Tools Marketing