In the last two articles, we have discussed the older versions of the Microsoft SQL Server, from the SQL Server 1.0 to SQL Server 2008. We have discussed how this remarkable system started and how it had evolved to what it is today. We have enumerated the upgrades, improvements and changes that it went through to meet the needs of the users.
Now we will wrap up these versions by focusing on the last two that were released to manufacturing in 2012 and 2014.
SQL Server 2012
There are phases to this particular version of the SQL Server. In 2011, during the PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) summit, Microsoft said that SQL Server 2012 will be the next major version of this database management system. The first to be manufactured was SQL Server 2012 in March of 2012 while the Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 were manufactured in November 2012 and June 2014, respectively. The features of this version included the following:
- Provide support to OLE DB (announced to be the last version to do so as Microsoft expressed preference for ODBC in native connectivity)
- Provides options to improve database availability through the AlwaysOn SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups
- Simplified process of moving databases among instances through the Contained Databases
- Improved Dynamic Management Views and Functions
- Enhancement in programmability including spatial features, sequence objects, THROW statements and metadata discovery
- Enhancement in performance through ColumnStore Indexes
- Improvement to OnLine and partition level operations
- Enhancement in security including provisions for setup
- New permissions
- Improvement in role management
- Groups with default schema assignment
SQL Server 2014
The last version was manufactured early this year in March. In November 2013, the plan was to have two CTP revisions that will be called CTP1 and CTP2. The other features of this version includes the following:
- In-memory capabilities for tables so it can fully fit in a memory and thus eliminate the need for ‘plumbing’ disk-based database (including saving of tables in a disk, reserving RAM, writing pages evicted to the disk, loading of pages from the disk, locking pages in RAM as operation commences).
- Improve performance through the SSD Buffer Pool Extension that allows caching between spinning media and DRAM through the use of SSDs
- Increase of readable secondaries count, and sustaining the read operations upon secondary disconnections to enhance AlwaysOn (HADR) solution
- Use Windows Azure to provide solutions for hybrid disaster recovery and backup, thus enabling users to utilize existing skills for older versions of SQL Server while taking advantage of the global datacenters of Microsoft
- Database application scalability within a physical or virtual environment through the integration of new Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 capabilities
These two are the latest version of the SQL Server of Microsoft. Definitely, this will not be the last of the versions that Microsoft will be making. If it is the last, then we can assume that they will create a better replacement. As technologies advance and change over time, system providers will continue to create improved versions of what we have today.
Information credited to Wikipedia.org
Image courtesy of Infotechlead.com