Taking SQL Server Code Name “Denali” Beyond Relational in CTP3
Over the last couple of months the SQL engineering team has been busy preparing SQL Server Code Name “Denali” CTP3. As part of that effort, I have been driving the Beyond Relational scenario, that is adding some useful, cool and in some cases long awaited capabilities to SQL Server in the context of managing unstructured data and spatial data management. The video below gives you a quick overview of what we have added in “Denali:”
In the area of providing a rich experience over unstructured data we have added:
- Lots of performance and scale work in Full-Text Search!
- Customizable NEAR in FTS
- The ability to search only within document properties instead of the full document
- Semantic Similarity Search between documents. This provides you the ability to answer questions such as: “Find documents that talk about the same thing as this other document!”
- Better scalability and performance for FileStream data, including the ability to store the data in multiple containers
- Full Win 32 application compatibility for unstructured data stored in a new table called FILETABLE. You create a Filetable and can drag and drop your documents into the database and run your favorite Windows applications on them (e.g., Office, Windows Explorer).
In the spatial area we have added a lot of additional items including:
- Circular arc support
- GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY method parity
- FullGlobe support for GEOGRAPHY
- Spatial aggregation
- Performance improvements
- Better predictable default index
- Index support for nearest neighbor queries
You can also see a detailed presentation on Channel 9.
Michael Rys
Principle Program Manager
SQL Server Database Engine Team
