Data Driver

Blog archive

Microsoft Announces SQL Server 2014

Microsoft today announced SQL Server 2014, designed with "cloud-first principles" and featuring built-in, in-memory OLTP and a focus on real-time, Big Data-style analytics. No specific realease date was provided in the announcement.

"Our Big Data strategy to unlock real-time insights continues with SQL Server 2014," said Quentin Clark, corporate vice president with the Data Platform Group, in a blog post. "We are embracing the role of data--it dramatically changes how business happens. Real-time data integration, new and large data sets, data signals from outside LOB systems, evolving analytics techniques and more fluid visualization and collaboration experiences are significant components of that change."

The news came with a slew of other big product announcements at the TechEd North America conference in New Orleans, such as Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. All will be available in preview later this month.

A key feature of SQL Server 2014 is the incorporation of in-memory, online transaction processing (OLTP) technology stemming from a project that has been in the works for several years, codenamed "Hekaton," Clark said. Developed in conjunction with Microsoft Research, Hekaton greatly improves transaction processing speeds and reduces latency by virtue of working with in-memory data, as opposed to disk-based data.

Microsoft touted the benefits of the "conscious design choice" to build the Hekaton technology into SQL Server 2014, with no need for a separate data engine. "Other vendors are either introducing separate in-memory optimized caches or building a unification layer over a set of technologies and introducing it as a completely new product," said Dave Campbell, Microsoft technical fellow, when Hekaton was announced as a coming component of SQL Server 2014 last November. "This adds complexity forcing customers to deploy and manage a completely new product or, worse yet, manage both a 'memory-optimized' product for the hot data and a storage-optimized' product for the application data that is not cost-effective to reside primarily in memory," Campbell said.

Clark picked up on that theme in today's announcement. "For our customers, 'in the box' means they don’t need to buy specialized hardware or software and can migrate existing applications to benefit from performance gains," he said.

Clark also emphasized the embrace of cloud computing, noting how SQL Server 2014 will work seamlessly with the cloud-based Windows Azure to reduce operating expenditures for mission-critical applications. "Simplified cloud backup, cloud disaster recovery and easy migration to Windows Azure Virtual Machines are empowering new, easy to use, out-of-the-box hybrid capabilities," he said.

The Microsoft exec also noted SQL Server 2014 will include improvements to the AlwaysOn feature, supporting "new scenarios, scale of deployment and ease of adoption."

As mentioned, Microsoft provided no release date, but that detail was bound to be foremost in the minds of many users, such as one named Patrick who posted the very first reader comment on Clark's blog post: "Are there some dates (other than 2014)?"

What do you think of the big news about SQL Server 2014? Comment here or drop me a line.

Posted by David Ramel on 06/04/2013


comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

    New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.

  • Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.

  • VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

    The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.

  • Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

    "Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."

  • Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

    Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events