NEW FEATURES IN SQL SERVER 2014 !

SQL Server 2014

Microsoft announced SQL Server 2014 at this year’s TechEd 2013 conference in New Orleans. Quentin Clark, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for SQL Server, said that Microsoft is getting ready for the upcoming SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1, on June 25, 2013 release. Some of the most important new features in SQL Server 2014 include the following :

1.  Hekaton-In-Memory OLTP Engine

The new In-Memory OLTP Engine (formerly code-named Hekaton) will provide OLTP performance improvements by moving selected tables into memory. The In-memory OTLP Engine works with commodity hardware and won’t require any application code changes. A built-in wizard will help you to choose which tables go in memory and select the stored procedures that will be compiled into machine code for high performance execution. Another advantage of Hekaton is that individual rows are never locked even when they are being written into a table. The RDMS writes the updated row to a new location and also maintains a pointer to this location in the old row. This technique is known as ‘Optimistic Concurrency’.

2.  Windows Azure Integrated Backup

The new backup option is integrated into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It lets you back up a SQL Server database to Windows Azure. You can also use it to quickly restore database backups to an Azure VM.

3.   xVelocity – Column-store indexes feature of SQL Server 2014

This feature allows continuous loading of data, speeds up query execution by storing columns in an effective way, allows compression of data in the index, enables DBAs to load and delete data in existing column-store indexes, and so on.

4.  Improved Scalability

SQL Server 2014 will have the ability to scale up to 640 logical processors and 4TB of memory in a physical environment. It can scale to 64 virtual processors and 1TB of memory when running in a virtual machine (VM). New buffer pool enhancements increase performance by extending SQL Server’s in-memory buffer pool to SSDs for faster paging.

5.  SQL Server AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn Availability Groups have also been integrated with Azure, providing AlwaysOn capabilities in the cloud. AlwaysOn Azure integration enables you to create asynchronous Availability Group replicas in Azure for disaster recovery.

Like the new Azure backup feature, the Azure AlwaysOn Availability options are completely integrated into SSMS. Other enhancements to AlwaysOn Availability Groups include the ability to have up to eight replicas—up from four in SQL Server 2012.

6.  Business Intelligence and Data Visualization Enhancements

SQL Server 2014 gives you a  new data visualization tool, code-named Data Explorer. Data Explorer enables data analysis in Microsoft Excel, and its can work with a wide variety of sources including relational, structured, and semi-structured data such as OData, Hadoop, and the Azure Marketplace.

The new feature, code-named GEOFlow, will able to provide visual data mapping in Excel. Other BI enhancements include the ability for Power View to work against multidimensional cube data in addition to tabular data models.

7.  Cache frequently used data on Solid State Disks (SSDs)

SQL Server 2014 can cache active and frequently used data in SSD and store others on disks. SSDs come to your help if you are stuck with bigger active data that you cannot fit in memory.

8.  Improved Integration with Windows Server 2012

SQL Server 2014 will also provide support for Windows Server 2012’s new Storage Spaces feature. Storage Spaces enables you to create pools of tiered storage that can improve application availability and performance. SQL Server 2014’s Resource Governor can take advantage of Windows Server 2012’s automated storage tiering. Plus, you can use the Resource Governor to manage and limit application IO utilization.