News

SQL Server 2012 Reaches General Availability

Microsoft TechNet and MSDN subscribers only have access to the Evaluation edition; or they can purchase the product.

SQL Server 2012, Microsoft's flagship database product, is officially out.

What's actually available, though, is a bit of a mystery.

Microsoft describes it as being at the "general availability" stage, which means it's a purchasable final product. Marketing festivities associated with its release were held earlier in a March 7 Microsoft "launch event."

Those wanting to get their hand on the bits can follow this link. However, it leads to an evaluation copy of SQL Server 2012, which is good for six months. It can be upgraded to the paid version. At press time, the release date for the evaluation copy was 3/6/12 (an unexplained circumstance).

Customers with Software Assurance or those wanting to purchase SQL Server 2012 outright need to reach their partner representative or Microsoft agent or get it through the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center. Microsoft TechNet and MSDN subscribers just have access to the Evaluation edition or they can purchase the product, according to a Microsoft spokesperson.

"TechNet and MSDN subscribers have access to evaluation bits and can purchase the final product through volume licensing," the spokesperson explained via e-mail.

Microsoft notably switched to core-based licensing with the release of SQL Server 2012. For organizations with more than four cores per processor, this switch likely will mean higher prices, at least for those organizations wanting to run the new Enterprise edition.

Microsoft changed the product editions with this release. Enterprise edition is now the top-of-the-line product that comes with "unlimited" virtualization rights. The BI edition is a new product for organizations interested in using Microsoft's business intelligence improvements in SQL Server 2012. Finally, Microsoft offers a Standard edition.

A comparison of the features enabled by each product can be found at Microsoft's page here. For an overview of SQL Server features, see this article.

On top of the evaluation edition, Microsoft offers a free SQL Sever 2012 Express edition for lightweight use, which can be downloaded here.

There is a specific version of SQL Server 2012 that designed just for developers called LocalDB. This LocalDB developer version is based on SQL Server 2012 Express but it has a richer feature set and is designed so that developers won't have to maintain SQL Server 2012 Express, according to a Microsoft blog explanation. Microsoft also plans to offer a Compact edition of SQL Server 2012, which has greater limitations on binary file sizes compared with LocalDB, according to the blog. The Microsoft Download Center has lots of SQL Server 2012 components listed, but downloads for LocalDB and Compact editions could not be seen at press time.

Microsoft's newest relational database system can be installled on "Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2, [and] Windows Vista Service Pack 2," according to the requirements. However, some people have experimented with it on the Windows Server 8 beta.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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