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Boosting Transaction Performance in Windows Azure Virtual Machines with In-Memory OLTP
With the release of SQL Server 2014 CTP2, you can now significantly boost the performance of your OLTP workloads in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. By creating a new VM with our preloaded image of SQL Server 2014 CTP2 on Windows Server 2012 R2, or installing SQL Server 2014 CTP2 on your VM, In-Memory OLTP functionalities -
Two SQL Server Jump Starts, Live on December 3rd and 4th
If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out the SQL Server 2014 CTP2? Essentially feature complete, this second public community technical preview enables you to try and test all of the capabilities of the full SQL Server 2014 release. To help get you trained on the new capabilities, Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) has two lively, demo filled -
The Modern Data Warehouse
In recent surveys by TDWI Research, roughly half of respondents report that they will replace their primary data warehouse (DW) platform and/or analytic tools within three years. Ripping out and replacing a DW or analytics platform is expensive for IT budgets and intrusive for business users. This raises the question: What circumstances would lead so -
Evolving your SQL Server Data Warehouse to the Next Generation, High Performance Solution, the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW)
Last week, we highlighted a whitepaper that focused on the performance benefits of SQL Server PDW and how it differs from traditional SQL Server. We’ve seen many SQL Server customers evolve to this latest PDW as their next generation platform for their data warehouse infrastructure for many of the reasons noted in that whitepaper and -
How Does SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) Deliver the Performance that it Does?
Last week, we introduced you to SQL Server PDW, the version of SQL Server built specifically for high performance data warehousing that delivers performance gains of up to 50x compared to traditional data warehouses. The next logical question we often get is “how is this possible?” Is it just SQL Server running on special hardware? -
SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP: Memory Management for Memory-Optimized Tables
Memory-optimized tables must fully reside in memory and can’t be paged out. Unlike disk-based tables where insufficient memory can slowdown an application, the impact to  memory-optimized tables upon encountering out-of-memory can be severe, causing DML (i.e. delete, insert or update) operations to fail. While this adds a new dimension to managing memory, the application failure -
Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools Update
With the release of SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2) and the commercial release of Visual Studio 2013, we are excited to announce new preview releases of SQL Server Data Tools to support both database and business intelligence projects. SQL Server Data Tools – Business Intelligence for SQL Server 2014 Preview To support -
SQL Server 2014 In-Memory OLTP: Nonclustered Indexes for Memory-Optimized Tables
SQL Server 2014 CTP1 introduced hash indexes for memory-optimized tables. Hash indexes are very efficient for point lookups, when you know exactly the value you are looking for. However, they do not perform well if you need a range of value, for example a date range, or if you need to retrieve the rows in -
New In-Memory OLTP Sample for SQL Server 2014 CTP2
To help you get started with the new In-Memory OLTP feature, we created a sample around sales order processing based on the AdventureWorks sample database. The sample, along with installation and usage instructions, are available on Codeplex: https://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/114491 We encourage you to download and install the sample to become familiar with the new memory-optimized tables -
IO Resource Governance in SQL Server 2014
Resource Governor was introduced in SQL Server 2008 to achieve predictable performance in a multi-tenant environment, to support mixed workload patterns, to provide mechanisms and tools to deal with runaway queries, and to enforce resource limits for CPU and memory. It enables customers to implement database consolidation or to configure their own database as a service. -
Get to Know the SQL Server that’s Purpose Built for High Performance Data Warehousing and Big Data Analytics – the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse Appliance
If your business relies on data, you know that it is a constant challenge to store, manage, and analyze it effectively as your data continues to grow. It’s also expensive to keep enough data on “hot” storage where it is readily available for analysis. Even when you have the data you need on hot storage, it -
In-Memory OLTP: High Availability for Databases with Memory-Optimized Tables
Starting with SQL Server 2012, the new offering of AlwaysOn Availability Groups and AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) suite of features have enabled Tier-1 customers with mission critical applications to achieve their availability goals with SQL Server with an easy to deploy and manage solution. SQL Server 2014 builds on this success and offers enhanced -
Revolutionizing City Planning in the 21st Century with Windows Azure, HDInsight, and SQL Server
If you’ve ever played a video game where you manage a virtual city, you understand how real-time insight into services including emergency response teams and transportation is needed for effective city planning. Until recently, the technologies just weren’t available to support this kind of detailed “big picture” view enjoyed by gamers. However, now that Big -
Customers get Faster and Better Insight into More Data from More Sources with Windows Azure HDInsight Service
Collecting Big Data is significant only if you can make use of it. With Windows Azure HDInsight Service, organizations can use Apache Hadoop clusters in Windows Azure. Combining the Microsoft platform with open-source tools like Hadoop equates to unprecedented insight into more data, from more sources, in any format—structured and unstructured. Here are a few