SQL Server 2014 CTP1 & SQL Server Data Tools June 2013 Update

At the beginning of the month I posted about the next version of SQL Server being called SQL Server 2014, well now the first publicly available build of it is available for download! You can download it from this link along with a post about the new features included. To download it you will need to have a TechNet or MSDN subscription, which I have recommended for anyone that works with the Microsoft server technologies before to keep up with the latest versions.

There is also a good blog posts about getting started with the new in-memory OLTP in SQL Server 2014 (previously called Hekaton) by the SQL Server database team. I'm sure that there will be more of these posts for the other new features in SQL Server 2014 over time. If you have access to an Azure account you can now also create a VM with SQL Server 2014 CTP1 via a template, which is a really quick way to get a new server setup to test out.

And for those that are using SQL Server 2012 a new update to SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) has also been updated with the new June 2013 update. New features added include Data Compare, Extensibility and Build & Deployment Contributors and a few others. When you go to the download page you will also notice that there is a separate download for what is now being called SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2012. Not sure why Microsoft is doing this, but yet again the BI functions look like they are being separated out into separate downloads. This goes against everything that I thought SSDT was going to fix with it being a single tool, but I'm guessing the different groups in Microsoft are having issues working together to provide a single download for all functions in SSDT, which is too bad.