Search results matching tag 'SQL 2012'

Is the SAN dying???

RickHeiges — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:55:00 GMT

Is the SAN dying?

The reason that I ask this question is that MSFT has unleashed technologies this year that point in that direction

Always ON Availability Groups shuns shared storage
Windows 2012 has Storage Replication Technology that does not require a SAN
Windows 2012 has Hyper-V Replica Technology that does not require a SAN
PDW v2 continues to reinforce the approach to avoid shared storage

I'm not saying that SAN technology does not have its place or does not have benefits inherent to the beast. I'm just pointing out that MSFT has made investments in technology that diminish the need for SANs.

Thoughts?

September 12 in San Fran

RickHeiges — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 02:04:00 GMT

Just a reminder that I will be speaking at the SF UG SQL Server User Group on Sep 12. Here is a link with all of the details. If you are in the area, It would be great to see you!

Sep 10 Week - I'll be on the West Coast Speaking in Irvine and San Fran

RickHeiges — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 17:49:00 GMT

In my role as a Solutions Architect for Scalability Experts, I often get to present to customers about the work that we performed. Unfortunately, this is often on short notice and I can't coordinate a trip to participate in a User Group Meeting. Next week, I was able to coordinate my west coast trip to be able to present. I am heading to Irvine at the MTC on Sepember 11 and San Francisco at the MSFT offices on Sep 13 to speak to customers who want to learn more about SQL Server 2012.To register for the Irvine event, click here. To register for the SF event, click here.

Topics covered will include:

Always On Overview
Column Store Index
Licensing Overview
Upgrading to SQL Server 2012

All of this will be covered in about 3 hours and is geared for folks who have not spent a lot of time learning about SQL Server 2012 yet.

Since I knew about this ahead of time, I was also able to secure a chance to speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on the evening of Sep 12. You can read more about it in my previous blog post located here.

Hope to see you there!

Comparing Standard Editions of SQL Server

RickHeiges — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Recently, I've been speaking with customers about upgrading SQL Server. At times, some customers have a lot of Standard Edition SQL Server 2005 / 2008 / 2008R2 in their organization and they want to see the features they get when upgrading to SQL Server 2012. Last week, I sent out some tweets to the #sqlhelp hashtag to see if someone has already put together a document or blog post about comparing the Standard Editions. I was unable to discover anything out there that really focuses just on Standard Edition. So I decided to put together a small table comparing the features based on the offical Edition features links like this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc645993(v=sql.100).aspx

Category / Feature	2008	2008R2	2012	Comments
CPU / Cores	4 CPUs	4 CPUs	16 cores	Based on the assumption of 4 cores per CPU
RAM	64 GB	64 GB	64 GB
Max DB Size	524 PB	524 PB	524 PB
Server Core Support	No	No	Yes	Significantly Reduce Patching
DB Recovery Advisor	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
Failover Clustering	2-node	2-node	2-node
Backup Compression	No	Yes	Yes	New in 2008 R2
Automatic Corruption Recovery from Mirror	Yes	Yes	Yes	New Feature in 2008
Multi-Instance Support	16	50	50	Stand-Alone
Security – Basic Auditing	No	No	Yes	Still no Fine-Grained Auditing
Security – User Defined Server Roles	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
Contained Databases	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
Distributed Replay	No	No	Yes (1 client)	New Feature in 2012
SQL Server Data Tools	No	No	Yes	New Feature in 2012
DTS Runtime	Yes	Yes	No	Removed in 2012
Enhanced Gauges / Charting / Maps in SSRS	Yes	Yes	Yes	New Feature in 2008
Enhanced Extended Events	No	No	Yes	New in 2012

Most of the things that you hear about when a new version of SQL Server is released is in Enterprise (or Data Center) Edition. Standard Edition is very solid. Upgrading from SQL 2005 Standard Edition to SQL 2012 Standard Edition yields a lot of nice features. As you would expect, upgrading to SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition from 2008/2008R2 does not yield as many benefits. Currently, most of the customers that I deal with have approximately half of their installed base on SQL Server 2005. They can capitalize on some nice features by upgrading to SQL Server 2012.

I know that there are probably even more things that I did not cover as benefits of upgrading from earlier Standard Editions to SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition. If so, please leave a comment and I will update the blog post.