SQL Server releases seem to be coming thick and fast these days. Since SQL Server 2005, there has been a new release nearly every two years. Most of the new features have had a business intelligence focus since SQL Server 2005. There have been some features that the production DBA that looks after transaction systems would have an interest in, such as the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature introduced with SQL Server 2012. This new release of SQL Server has some great new features that will capture the attention of the database administrator "in the trenches". You will learn how to improve the performance of your transactional databases by utilizing the new In-Memory OLTP features. Cloud has been a buzz word for a quite a long time, and SQL Server 2014 allows closer integration with the cloud using Microsoft Azure. You can create complete virtual machines with SQL Server installed in Microsoft Azure or you can simply store your database files in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Chapter 1, SQL Server 2014 and Cloud, will teach you how to make use of Microsoft Azure Storage to store the data files of your local instance databases in the cloud.
Chapter 2, Backup and Restore Improvements, will cover how to back up your database to a URL and Microsoft Azure Storage. It will also teach you to use native tools to encrypt your SQL Server backups.
Chapter 3, In-Memory Optimized Tables, explores the main new features of In-Memory OLTP, which can significantly improve performance of your transactional systems.
Chapter 4, Delayed Durability, offers the DBA the option of controlling how transactions are written to the transaction log. This setting can also significantly help improve the performance of your database.
Chapter 5, AlwaysOn Availability Groups, discusses the enhancements in AlwaysOn Availability groups and shows how you to set up a replica on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine.
Chapter 6, Performance Improvements, covers some of the other new features and enhancements that can help improve performance.
For this book, you will need the SQL Server 2014 software. If you want to set up and make use of the Microsoft Azure features, you will need a Microsoft Azure subscription. You can sign up for a free trial at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/. If you want to set up and explore the AlwaysOn Availability feature, you will need at least three virtual machines. I like to use VMware Fusion on my Mac, but you can use whichever hypervisor suits you.
This book is for people who want to learn the new features of SQL Server 2014, especially database administrators and system administrators. In order to get the most out of this book, you need to have some previous experience in managing and administering a SQL Server instance.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Give the virtual machine a name. In my case, I have named my virtual machine GRESQL2014."
A block of code is set as follows:
CREATE DATABASE TestDB1
ON
(NAME = TestDB1_data,
FILENAME = 'https://gresqlstorage.blob.core.windows.net/sqldata/TestDB1Data.mdf')
LOG ON
(NAME = TestDB1_log,
FILENAME = 'https://gresqlstorage.blob.core.windows.net/sqldata/TestDB1Log.ldf')
GOAny command-line input or output is written as follows:
CREATE CREDENTIAL [https://gresqlstorage.blob.core.windows.net/sqldata] WITH IDENTITY='SHARED ACCESS SIGNATURE', SECRET = 'sr=c&si=SQLDATA&sig=PtQi1NXUuJz%2BGCUkpdgEBS4o4Lo60FjTbfJ2dNx3XX8%3D'
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Click on the SQL DATABASES option in the left-hand side menu".
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