Overview

Microsoft SQL Server is a cloud-ready information platform that will help organizations unlock breakthrough insights across the organization and quickly build solutions to extend data across on-premises and public cloud, backed by mission critical confidence.

Capabilities

Mission Critical Confidence

Required 9s and protection
Deliver required uptime and data protection, server to cloud without wasting time and money.
  • Help reduce planned and unplanned downtime with the new integrated high availability and disaster recovery solution, SQL Server AlwaysOn.
  • Achieve maximum application availability and data protection with options to configure active, multiple secondaries and ability to quickly failover and recover applications.

Blazing-fast performance
Gain breakthrough and predictable performance backed by industry-leading benchmarks.
  • Overview Make a bet on a trusted platform that continuously leads in industry-relevant TPC-E, TPC-H and real-world application performance 　benchmarks. Release over release SQL Server is SAP-certified to run some of the industry’s most demanding workloads.
  • Significantly boost query performance, by up to ~10x for star join and similar queries with the new ColumnStore Index.






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Breakthrough Insight

Rapid data discovery
Empower end users with new insights through rapid data exploration and visualization.
  • Discover new insights at the speed of thought with Power View, a highly interactive, familiar browser-based data exploration, visualization, and presentation experiences for users of all levels.
  • Empower users of all levels to access and mash-up data from virtually any source, create compelling reports and analytical applications, and easily collaborate and share insight using familiar tools with PowerPivot for Microsoft Excel 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Managed self-service BI
Enable users with self-service BI while gaining better monitoring and management capabilities for IT.
  • Offload IT tasks and reduce support requests with self-service analytics tools, like Power View and PowerPivot, that scale to thousands across the organization.
  • Balance the need to monitor, manage, and govern the data and analytics end users create with IT dashboards and controls that help IT monitor end user activity, data source usage, and gather performance metrics from servers.

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Cloud On Your Terms

Scale on demand
Scale on demand with flexible and hybrid deployment options on your terms server to cloud.
  • Gain operational flexibility with proven Microsoft cloud offerings, private or public, that deliver interoperable deployment options with SQL Server 2012.
  • Break free and scale beyond the constraints of any one deployment environment by taking advantage Hybrid IT opportunities with a common architecture that spans traditional servers, appliances and the cloud.

Extend any data, virtually anywhere
Extend the reach of data virtually anywhere across server and/or cloud with expansive developer technologies.
  • Enable new scenarios with Windows Azure SQL Database Data Sync, a cloud service that provides bi-directional data synchronization between databases across datacenter and cloud.
  • Provide a consistent and open data-feed to power multiple user experiences across the web, devices and desktop with OData, an open protocol built on widely used web standards.



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SQL Server 2012 Editions

SQL Server 2012 will provide Mission Critical Confidence with greater uptime, blazing-fast performance and enhanced security features for mission critical workloads; Breakthrough Insight with managed self-service data exploration and stunning interactive data visualizations capabilities; Cloud On Your Own Terms by enabling the creation and extension of solutions across on-premises and public cloud. SQL Server 2012 will be available in three main editions: 

Enterprise

Enterprise for Mission Critical & Applications Data Warehousing
  • Advanced high availability with AlwaysOn
  • High performance data warehousing with ColumnStore
  • Maximum virtualization (with Software Assurance)
  • Inclusive of Business Intelligence edition's capabilities

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Business Intelligence NEW!

Business Intelligence for Premium Self-Service and Corporate Business Intelligence
  • Rapid data discovery with Power View
  • Corporate and scalable reporting and analytics
  • Data Quality Services and Master Data Services
  • Inclusive of the Standard edition's capabilities

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Standard

Standard continues to offer basic database, reporting and analytics capabilities









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Reasons to Migrate to SQL Server 2012

Organizations today are under tremendous pressure to implement effective cost-control strategies without sacrificing growth, productivity, functionality, or flexibility. Enterprises that currently support multiple data platforms face issues of inconsistency and higher short-term and long-term licensing and service costs. As a database management solution, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 provides everything an organization needs to lower its total-cost-of-ownership, manage all volumes of data from birth to archival, and provide mission-critical functionality and reliability. 

Top benefits of migrating:
  • Low total-cost-of-ownership
  • Full scalability, up and out
  • Increased performance and speed
  • Reduced IT and storage costs
  • Minimized downtime
  • Always-On Technologies: always available
  • Consolidated, enterprise-class environment
  • Interoperability with Microsoft Office

Which platform are you migrating from? 

The free Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) makes it easy to migrate data from Oracle, Microsoft Access, MySQL, and Sybase to SQL Server. SSMA converts the database objects to SQL Server database objects, loads those objects into SQL Server, migrates data to SQL Server, and then validates the migration of code and data. 

Why migrate from Oracle, Access, MySQL or Sybase?

SQL Server 2008 R2 provides everything an organization needs to lower its total-cost-of-ownership, manage all volumes of data from birth to archival, and provide mission-critical functionality, reliability, scalability, and security. SQL Server helps you to consolidate databases, virtualize servers, compress data, allocate resources more effectively, and manage with policies.