Performance & scalability

Blazing Fast Performance from Excel to the database engine backed by proven benchmarks.

  • Technical Best Practices Tour of ColumnStore Index
    Technical Best Practices Tour with ColumnStore Index

    SQL Server 2012 helps customers gain more predictable, next-generation performance backed by industry-leading and real-world application benchmarks.

    What's New in SQL Server 2012

    • Gain next-generation performance with xVelocity in-memory technologies.
    • Experience superior speed that is built into the engine.
    • Take advantage of tools for proactive performance management.
    • Rely on inherent scalability for better performance protection.

    Key Capabilities

    • Gain Next-Generation Performance

      Significantly reduce the time and energy wasted running complex DW and reporting queries.

      Benefit from Blazing-Fast Query Performance
      • Boost query performance by 10-100x¹ for star join and similar queries with xVelocity in-memory column store index for data warehousing.

        ¹Source: Microsoft xVelocity Performance Benchmark
      • Apply the new column store index to most data warehousing queries with no application changes required.
      Experience Business Insight at the Speed of Thought
      • Interactively explore 10's of billions of rows of data using xVelocity in-memory analytics engine for business intelligence.
      • Dramatically compress data up to 300x² with xVelocity in-memory analytics which uses aggressive compression and column-oriented storage.

        ²Source: Microsoft internal testing

    • Rely on Predictable Performance

      Benefit from a higher level of predictability, and perform more proactive troubleshooting and diagnostics with SQL Server 2012.

      Experience More Consistent Performance
      • Achieve more consistent performance for concurrent and mixed workloads by defining resource usage with Resource Governor.
      • 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.
      Utilize Proactive Management Tools
      • Access, configure, manage, and administer components of SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio as your single environment.
      • Collect data from T-SQL queries and bundle it into a collection set for analysis using the Performance Data Collector.
      • Use Policy-Based Management to create policies for proactively managing entities on the server.
      • Monitor specific events and capture server events for near real-time diagnosis using SQL Server Profiler.
      • Gain better insight into resource utilization with multi-server management to proactively make changes before trouble arises.
      Take Advantage of Built-in Speed
      • Accelerate performance of I/O intensive workloads and cut growing volumes of data ~50-60%¹ with enterprise-grade compression capabilities.

        ¹Source: Microsoft TechNet
      • More easily manage large data volumes for large sliding windows scenarios with applications like SAP via support for up to 15k partitions.
      • Support blazing-fast queries with dramatic improvements to Full-Text Search that offer serious performance and scale advances.
      • Improve the relevance of search results with new statistical semantic search which quickly delivers statistically relevant results.

    • Obtain Enterprise-Class Scalability

      Scale up and out across traditional server deployments and private and public cloud.

      Deploy and Scale Out
      • Grow beyond the constraints of any one deployment environment with Hybrid IT opportunities across traditional server and public cloud.
      • 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.
      • Leverage Service Broker to build more highly scalable, service-oriented solutions.
      Scale Up
      • 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.

    Related Solutions

    "Restructuring our data warehouses with xVelocity has helped reduce time to reporting by up to 99%."

    Wolfgang Kutschera
    Team Leader of Database Engineering, bwin.party

    White Papers

    Dig deeper into the capabilities of SQL Server through white papers written by top experts.