Performance, Scalability Improved in SQL Server 2012 SP3 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Performance, Scalability Improved in SQL Server 2012 SP3

Latest service pack comes more than a year after the last service pack, and also adds a number of enhanced monitoring capabilities.

By David Ramel
11/30/2015

It's been a long time coming -- nearly a year and a half since Service Pack 2 -- but Microsoft has finally released SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 3, which includes performance, scalability and diagnostics workload improvements.

SP2 featured supportability and functionality fixes to AlwaysOn, cube creation support for Analysis services, a fix for Integration Services and some performance fixes to the product's relational engine and storage engine, among numerous other new features. The storage engine's scalability and performance are further improved in SP3, Microsoft said in a blog post last week. Other key updates listed by Microsoft include:

Improvements in consistency check performance.
Query hints to provide granular control while using Resource Governor.
Additional monitoring capabilities through enhancements in DMV, Extended Events and Query Plans.
Improved performance while opening and reading XEL files using XEvent Linq reader.
Improved performance for spatial queries.

A blog post from the SQL Server Engineering Team provides more technical details of the various enhancements, ranging from performance and scalability improvements such as better consistency check performance achieved by "estimating memory grants correctly and making optimum use of CPU and memory" to better query performance troubleshooting via reporting of "information on memory grants, degree of parallelism and the threads used for executing the query."

In the coming weeks, Microsoft said it would delve even further into technical details of the updates on the Tiger blog.

In the meantime, SP3 is available to all customers with existing SQL Server 2012 deployments from the Microsoft Download Center and is slated to become available via Microsoft Update on Tuesday of next week, followed by other distribution avenues in following weeks, such as MSDN, Microsoft Action Pack Subscription (MAPS)/Microsoft Partner Network (MPN), MBS/Partner Source and the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center (VLSC).

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.