This post was authored by Chris Finlan, Sr. Program Manager, SQL Server. In today’s competitive business environment, organizations invest in business intelligence (BI) capabilities to drive the business forward. Improving customer satisfaction is the top reason for investing in business insights, closely followed by making better business decisions and gaining a competitive advantage. Now, if Read more
This post was authored by Ayo Olubeko, Program Manager, Data Developer Group. Two practices drive successful modern applications today – a fast time to market, and a relentless focus on listening to customers and rapidly iterating on their feedback. This has driven numerous improvements in software development and management practices. In this post, I will Read more
This post was authored by Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director of Data Platform Marketing. SQL Server 2016 is the foundation of Microsoft’s data strategy, encompassing innovations that transform data into intelligent action. With this new release, Microsoft is delivering an end-to-end data management and business analytics solution with mission critical intelligence for your most demanding applications Read more
We are excited to announce that our fourth and final SQL Server 2016 release candidate, SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate (RC) 3, is now available for download. Our SQL Server Release Candidates represent important milestones in the release of SQL Server 2016, as the product is now essentially feature complete, and means that a very Read more
This post was authored by Joe Yong, Sr. Program Manager, SQL Server. Stretch Database in SQL Server 2016 allows users to keep as much data as they need, for as long as they need, without incurring business service level agreement (SLA) risks or the high costs of enterprise storage. Unlike typical cold data solutions, by Read more
This post was authored by Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director, Product Marketing. Today is the last day of extended support for SQL Server 2005. Starting tomorrow, companies running SQL Server 2005 will no longer receive security updates or hotfixes from Microsoft. We started on this journey eighteen months ago, with our first discussion on the end Read more
This post was authored by Riccardo Muti, Senior Program Manager, SQL Server Reporting Services. Why should you upgrade your reporting platform? You might think of it as a cost of doing business considering your operational processes that depend on it, but recent research suggests that it can be a strategic investment as well. Forrester Research Read more
The cloud is now a fact of business life, and adoption is growing fast. Findings from a 2016 survey by RightScale found 95 percent of respondents are now using the cloud. Perhaps more noteworthy is the increase in hybrid cloud adoption from 58 percent to 71 percent year-over-year. The fact that the cloud has become Read more
We are excited to announce that our third SQL Server 2016 release candidate, SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate (RC) 2, is now available for download. Our SQL Server Release Candidates represent important milestones in the release of SQL Server 2016, as the product is now nearly feature complete, and means that a very rich set Read more
This post was co-authored by Dotan Elharrar, Principal Program Manager, Machine Learning, and Umachandar Jayachandran Senior Program Manager, SQL Server. R has emerged as the most popular software for mining data, uncovering new insights and making predictions. It’s a perfect starting point because it is free and open-source and offers an ever-growing and vibrant community. Read more
In SQL Server 2016 there have been several significant changes to the SQL Client Tools. Central to these changes are two primary goals: The ability to ship tooling updates on a regular, monthly cadence A single version of tools that work with all supported SQL Server versions on-premises or in a Virtual Machine, Azure SQL Read more
This post was authored by Casey Karst, Program Manager, SQL Server. Changing data landscape A lot has changed in the world of data over the last 10 years. The rise of connected devices, unstructured event data and ever-decreasing hardware prices has caused a Big Data boom. Solutions built on commodity hardware, such as Hadoop and Read more
