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- Availability Groups provides an integrated set of options including automatic and manual failover of a group of databases, support for up to four secondaries, fast application failover and automatic page repair
- Failover cluster instances
- Active secondary instances
- Multi-subnet failover
- Reduced patching downtime when run on Windows Server Core which is a low-maintenance bare-bones server install.
- High availability for StreamInsight.
- Performance improvements, including an in-memory column store, better full text search, up to 15000 partitions.
- Auditing is improved, authentication has been enhanced with user databases.
- Project Crescent "makes self-service reporting a reality by providing a highly interactive, web-based data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience to users of all levels—from business executives to information workers."
- PowerPivot enhancements
- Semantic search
- Managed self-service business intelligence
- Better SharePoint integration
- Improved data quality management tools
- Better integration across on-premise and cloud environments (Azure)
- SQL Server Express Local Database Runtime (LocalDB) - this appears to be an embeddable SQL server.
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