SQL Server Team articles

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SQL Server Team
Published 
4 min read

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 are immediately available to you.
Published 
1 min read

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 events planned.
Published 
1 min read

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 many people down such a dramatic path?
Published 
5 min read

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 due to resource errors is not something new.
Published 
3 min read

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.
Published 
1 min read

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.
Published 
5 min read

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.
Published 
1 min read

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.
Published 
1 min read

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 examples: Chr.