SQL Supper Notes

Yesterday evening there was a very special SQL Supper hosted at the Microsoft offices in London Victoria. It was an open session with some of the Microsoft Data Platform group, Mark Souza, Nigel Ellis, Conor Cunningham, Hatay Tuna and Ewan Fairweather. So I made my way by foot from the offices here in Covent Garden to London Victoria. Although February in London is rather chilly, with a brisk walk you can make it in half an hour, plus you pass several landmarks such as the piazza at Covent Garden, Trafalgar Square (and it’s controversial 4th plinth sculpture, the Blue Hahn Cock) the Mall, Buckingham Palace and finally, Westminster Cathedral.

SQL Server 2014 CTP1 Released

This week has been the week of the release: We’ve had the Visual Studio 2013 Preview and now the SQL Server 2014 CTP1. And that’s just the ones I’m focusing on! There’s the Windows 8.1 Preview as well as Windows Server 2012 R2. What with all the keynotes from Build and both TechEd’s this month, it is clear that Microsoft have certainly accelerated the release cycle and embraced a cloud-first development model. For me this is most noticeable in Team Foundation Services, the Azure based Source Control solution. Features were turned on regularly before they were released in the three updates we’ve had since the release of TFS 2012 back in August. This is a big change from the Microsoft’s previous strategy of developing for its products hosted on the premises first and then being pushed to them to the cloud afterwards.

At a later date I’ll dig more into features of SQL 2014, as this week my focus has been on Visual Studio 2013, which is out sometime this year, as well as doing my job in real life. The duties of blogging…

SQL Server 2014 Announced

Introduction

A week late and more than a few dollars short, this blog post is focusing on a few of the features announced for SQL Sever 2014. I’ve watched the Keynote and a few of the videos from the sessions at TechEd North America 2013, and read the whitepapers and datasheets. Information is still limited though, like which versions the features will be added to, so it’s certainly not a deep dive into the features. Nor is it an exhaustive list of the features; moreover, it’s a look at those ones that immediately piqued my interest in the Mission Critical Performance category of improvements.

Introduction to Hekaton Part One: MVCC

Hello folks, welcome to a post focusing on one of the future features of SQL Server. SQL Server 2012 is barely a year old, yet there is already talk on a feature that is to ship in the next major release of SQL Server. The current name of this feature is Hekaton, which is Greek for 100. I believe the reason for this name is because of the performance boost that one online gaming company experienced when working with Microsoft in implementing the technology preview of Hekaton.