SQL Server 2012 contains six new features for SSRS: Excel Renderer for Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007 & 2010 – Excel renderer will support the Excel 2007 XLSX format. To enable this feature, Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint must be … Continue reading →
Database Recovery Advisor is a new feature in SQL Server 2012 that introduces significant user experience enhancements to the ways DBAs can now restore databases using SQL Server Management Studio: An enhancement for point in time recovery using a new visual timeline feature, … Continue reading →
Extended Events is a general event-handling system for performance monitoring that was introduced in SQL Server 2008. It has a highly scalable and highly configurable architecture that allows users to collect as much or as little information as is necessary to troubleshoot or identify a … Continue reading →
SQL Server 2012 introduces several significant enhancements to spatial types, such as support for new subtypes of circular arcs, new and updated methods and aggregates for all subtypes, improved precision, and updates to the geography type. More info: New Spatial … Continue reading →
FileTable is a new feature in SQL Server 2012 that is built on top of SQL Server FILESTREAM technology, which allows BLOB data to be stored as individual files separate from a database’s data files. Interactions with the FileStream files … Continue reading →
Version 2 of PowerPivot (download) is being made available with SQL Server 2012. There are many new features, and my top 5 are: Diagram View – Instead of looking at the defined relationships in a list format, v2 allows you to view the … Continue reading →
Microsoft StreamInsight, first introduced in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, is a way to effectively analyze large amounts of event data streaming in from multiple sources. You can derive insights from critical information in near real-time. StreamInsight is a platform … Continue reading →
SQL Server 2012 has a number of new T-SQL features. Listed below are all of the new features, along with the best links I have found that describe each feature: WITH RESULT SETS, OFFSET AND FETCH, THROW, SEQUENCE: See New T-SQL … Continue reading →
A problem that has plagued SQL Server for a long time is that a database is not very portable. Sure, you can backup or detach a database and restore or attach it elsewhere, but when you do that, you are … Continue reading →
Data Quality Services (DQS) is a brand new feature in SQL Server 2012. In short, DQS enables you to build a knowledge base, and use that knowledge base to perform a variety of critical data quality tasks such as correction, enrichment, … Continue reading →
In previous SSIS versions as the developer you were responsible for configuring all of your logging options, such as what events you were going to log, which containers you were going to collect logs for, and where you were going … Continue reading →
SQL Server Master Data Services (MDS) has a number of enhancements in SQL Server 2012: Improved web user interface – If you are a current user of MDS in SQL Server 2008 R2 you know that it’s pretty difficult to … Continue reading →
SQL Server 2012 has many new security features, and three of the bigger new features are: Default Schema for Windows Groups, Audit enhancements, and User-Defined Server Roles. Default Schema for Windows Groups A database schema can now be tied to a … Continue reading →
AlwaysOn is a new integrated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution that provides redundancy within a datacenter and across datacenters to help enable fast application failover during planned and unplanned downtime. Specifically, AlwaysOn delivers failover cluster instances, multiple secondaries, active … Continue reading →
The SQL Server 2012 Developer Training Kit has been updated with a bunch of new content (download it here via the web installer). New and updated content will be released periodically and can be downloaded on-demand using the Web Installer. This … Continue reading →
Microsoft has posted the licensing for SQL Server 2012. It has simplified licensing: SQL Server 2012 will offer two licensing options – one that is based on computing power (“core based”), and one that is based on users or devices (“Server + … Continue reading →
SQL Server 2012 RC0 (Release Candidate 0), formerly known as SQL Server Denali, is now available for download. SQL Server 2012 RC0 is the first release which is feature complete. This was unexpected as no one gave any hints that it … Continue reading →
As a follow-up to my post SQL Server “Denali”: New Certifications, the seven exams for SQL Server 2012 are: Querying Microsoft SQL Server (70-461) [BI and DBA] (info) (course) Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases (70-462) [DBA] (info) Developing Microsoft … Continue reading →
Some announcements and notes from SQL PASS Summit 2011, going on this week: It was announced that the official name of the SQL Server “Denali” product is SQL Server 2012 and will be released in the first half of the year 2012. There … Continue reading →
With CTP3 for SQL Server 2012 (code name of “Denali”) available, a lot of us want to play with all the new cool features, as well as the new tools, such as Crescent and Juneau. The steps below are what I took to … Continue reading →