Mission Critical Confidence: Enable mission critical performance and availability environments at low TCO with SQL Server Code Name “Denali”
SQL Server Code Name “Denali” gives customers a lot of reasons to be excited, especially for those looking for additional mission critical capabilities to meet the evolving demands of today’s critical applications. Enhancements span the database engine to help customers gain the required 9s and data protection, blazing-fast performance, additional security & compliance, and added peace of mind.
Here are some of the exciting new enhancements that help customers further protect their infrastructure:
Required uptime and data protection with SQL Server AlwaysOn. The new integrated high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solution provides redundancy within a datacenter and across datacenters to help enable fast application failover during planned and unplanned downtime. AlwaysOn delivers a suite of new capabilities. Specifically, AlwaysOn, delivers failover cluster instances, multiple secondaries, active secondaries, and connection director capabilities (multi-subnet and read-only intent). Additionally, this new solution delivers a level of manageability and TCO that customers can expect from Microsoft; new wizards make setting up global HA and DR solutions a snap while dashboards within Management Studio make ongoing maintenance and management insightful and straightforward.
…And customers are already raving about AlwaysOn: “How is one hour reduced to one minute? Being able to leverage Microsoft SQL Server Code Name “Denali” for our database needs with the new AlwaysOn functionality provides a quick failover between sites. What used to take close to an hour (once we got all relevant teams together in a conference call) now takes less than one minute by leveraging the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature built into Denali,” says Reinaldo Kibel, Senior Database Architect with Dell.
Blazing-fast performance with new In-Memory Column Store, new tabular mode within SSAS, and improvements to SQL Server Beyond Relational features. Experience lightning fast performance gains across the infrastructure with SQL Server Denali. For data warehousing, Project Apollo enables a new column store index that offers 10-100x star join or similar query performance improvements. Apollo brings together the in-memory column store technology (VertiPaq) that is used in PowerPivot and a new query execution paradigm called batch processing to provide truly astonishing speed up for common data warehouse queries. In test scenarios customers have experienced approximately 100x improvements in star join and similar queries. VertiPaq is also integrated into Analysis Services and enables a new tabular mode that provides in-memory based analytics on ‘billions’ of rows of data at lightning fast speeds. An overhaul to Full-Text Search and enhancements in Spatial indexing bring magnitudes of performance and scale improvements.
Organizational security and compliance enablement with Audit enhancements, User-Defined Server Roles, and Default Schema for Windows Groups. Help enable greater compliance with new and enhanced security features. Enhancements to SQL Server auditing capabilities bring added flexibility and usability for auditing across the SQL Server environment, helping make it even easier for organizations to meet compliance policies. Now customers can leverage Audit capabilities across all editions of SQL Server for greater insight and reporting against policies while new User-Defined Audit and Audit Filtering make it more flexible to automatically capture events specific to individual customer compliance requirements. New User-Defined Server Roles increase flexibility and manageability and help facilitate compliance towards better separation of duties by allowing creation of new server roles to suit different organizations that separate multiple administrators according to roles. Additionally, we are so excited to deliver Default Schema for Windows Groups which brings dramatic usability improvements and can lead to greater compliance through reduced chance of errors when creating, assigning and using schemas.
Gain peace of mind with Distributed Replay and additional customer support programs. Simplify application testing and minimize errors with application changes, configuration changes, and upgrades using new Distributed Replay. This multi-threaded replay utility provides the ability to simulate production workload scenarios testing after upgrade or configuration changes ultimately leading to protected performance during changes. Additionally, Microsoft’s Premier Mission Critical Support and the Microsoft Critical Advantage Program, provide the services and support needed for companies to establish the proactive IT environment and operations necessary to deliver maximum availability and performance to their Mission Critical Applications—a perfect match for SQL Server Code Name “Denali” deployments but available for most any version of SQL Server.
