SQL 2012 provides several new capabilities to improve availability, speed, and analytics including AlwaysOn for high availability, columnstore indexes for faster query performance, and PowerPivot and Crescent for self-service business intelligence. It also features improvements to management and monitoring tools, upgrades, and support for big data solutions like Hadoop. While SQL 2008 meets current needs, SQL 2012 aims to support larger environments and includes performance enhancements that can benefit organizations of any size.

1. Seattle 10 12 11

3. Denali = SQL 2012
• Availability. HADR: The 9s you need
 AlwaysOn
 AlwaysOn provides database-level failover
 Integrated and updated log shipping and mirroring
 Clustering provides instance-level failover
 New jargon: Availability Groups, Replicas
• Speed
 New Columnstore index type

4.  Dramatically Improved query performance
• New index type ‘columnstore’
• Reduces ETL times since columnstore indexes reduce
the need to rely on summary tables, and indexed
(materialized) views.
• Groups and stores data for each column and then
joins all the columns to complete the whole index.
• Faster performance for common data warehousing
queries such as filtering, aggregating, grouping, and
star-join queries.
 Rapid insight via Crescent and PowerPivot
• Data warehouse products like blueCube solve similar
problems. Now built-in to SQL 2012.

5. Always On
SQL Reporting Services is now a
SharePoint 2010 Service Application
Powershell for SQL
• Allows scripting and automation of complex
tasks

6. Write applications once, run anywhere with
Juneau Developer Tools
Database and application development all
in one place. Integrates with BIDS and
Visual Studio.

7. High availability improvements
• Will research using Always On tools to reduce
recovery times
 SQL 2012’s performance enhancements will benefit all
our SQL-based apps
 CPM and dashboards provide improved management
and monitoring
 Improved online application of updates and OS patches.

8. DBA tech heaven
• Cloud
 Iaas, Saas, Paas
 Cost, trust, vendorlock, latency
• Trace Flags
• Upgrades
• Performance tuning
 worst offenders
• Centralized Policy Management
 Reduces need for 3rd party tools

9. Hadoop
• Apache’s open license Distributed File System
• Unstructured database technology
 Non-relational
 Insight over consistency
 Easier to manage at petabyte scale than relational
databases

10.  SQL 2008 is robust
• Meets Drake’s needs
• Drake’s environment is not especially large, but we are big
enough to have many of the problems that come with size.
 SQL 2012 is aiming for gigantic data warehousing
environments
• Big data capability will become the new normal
• SQL 2012 includes speed and management enhancements that
will help organizations of any size.
 SQL PASS is valuable
• The SQL PASS community provides ongoing instruction,
motivation and inspiration.
• Keeping informed of industry and technological trends.
• Seeing what’s coming and how to apply the new tools to the
issues we face here at Drake.