Accelerate Your Insights

If you missed the live stream of the SQL Server 2014 launch event in San Francisco earlier this week, it is now available for on-demand viewing on Microsoft's Accelerate Your Insights page. Great overview of the new data platform and BI updates that are all part of this new release of SQL Server and other platform updates. Interesting news that came out of this event was the re-branding of PDW (Parallel Data Warehouse) as APS (Analytics Platform System) as it now is not limited to just hosting a PDW region on the appliance but also a Hadoop region on the same appliance. This should help to sell these appliances even more as you can use the same appliance for both "un-structured" and structured data and be able to do analysis across both regions using the same tools we are used to including Excel.

The biggest feature that is being focused on for SQL Server 2014 is having In-Memory available on the entire platform and the huge performance improvements that brings. In-Memory was first introduced in SQL Server 2012 but was a read-only index, now it can be clustered and fully update-able, which makes it a huge change to how you can access the data in the databases. Looking forward to working with clients to enable these features as it really does push SQL Server to the forefront of enterprise databases.

Note: If you have any issues with the videos not streaming smoothly (as I had) you can just right click on the video window and save the MPEG-4 video files locally.