Just Announced - SQL Server 2012 - coming to you in 2012

SQL Server 2012 is coming!

Today at SQL PASS SUMMIT 2011, our CVP Ted Kummert revealed the product name of the next version of SQL Server code name "Denali".
As it might not come to any surprise we are proud to announce SQL Server 2012, releasing in - 2012!

What I am excited about are the strong pillars on SQL Server 2012.

Mission Critical Confidence

SQL Server as the mission critical paltform, on performance and high availability at a low TCO.

The enhancements with AlwaysON, providing 2 times faster failover, and a signifcicant reduced downtime brings a unique position of high availability through Windows Server core support, Online Operations Enhancements,
with integrated configuration Wizards, Powershell Support, and the AlwaysOn Dashboard, allowing you to configure AlwaysOn through Powershell.
From the AlwaysON support we can have Active Secondaries, allowing you for Scale read only applications

Performance enhancements with columnstore provide increased performance that will increase query performance significantly.
A great demo on columstore is the session that was delivered by Eric Hanson at TechED North America which can be found here.

Full text search enhancements and higher scalability (partitioning now increased to 15000) are some of the key enhancements delivering on that Mission Critical Confidence and Scale

Security enhancements, including advanced auditing, contained databases , data tier applications and user defined server roles provide great security benefits exceeding industry standards,
and allow you to easily deploy applications.

Migration and Upgrade enhancements (think about Upgrade Advisor), is enhanced with Distributed Replay to allow application testing and database replay

 Breakthrough Insights

With breakhtrough insights we provide and unlock new insights with pervasive data discovery across the organization.
We are releasing the next generation of PowerPivot, and PowerView ( Crescent ), bringing you a new level of browser based reporting, fully integrated within SharePoint 2010.

The rich data expereince allows you to connect to nearly any data source, including our connector to Hadoop to perform in-memory analysis in Excel 2010, with PowerPivot.
Data refresh can be set and important into Analysis Services and grab a self-serviced created PowerPivot Report, integrate it within an Analysis Services cube.

End User alerting allows you to

Data Quality Services provides enhanced data cleansing, seamlessly integrated with SQL Server Integration Services, and integration with 3rd party services to perform a better, more accurate and performant data cleansing.

Cloud on your terms

SQL Server provides Choice in data store, both for structured, unstructed and complex data.

We enhanced and embraced Hadoop through a Hadoop connector for SQL Server, as well as PDW, with a Hadoop based distribution on Windows Server and Windows Server Azure to ship in CY2012.

The Hadoop connector, is also available for SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, and can be found here

Appliances 

In the keynote Ted also reinstated the release of SQL Server Parallel Datawarehouse, which includes Dell as a partner and appliance provider for PDW ,  the  Database Consolidation appliance, and cloud.

Hands-on with SQL Server 2012

Are you getting excited and hyped around the new features in SQL Server 2012.
The SQL Server Learning Center hosts hands-on-labs on all the above technologies - ready for you to go.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/learning-center/virtual-labs.aspx