News

Release candidate 0 is now available for download (HT: Mark Riffey). 

Also via Mark, here's the whitepaper on the changes in 2012. Features discussed include:

• 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.

Links

• http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/: SQL Server Web site
• http://www.microsoft.com/denali SQL Server Code Name ―Denali‖
• http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/: SQL Server TechCenter
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sqlserver/: SQL Server DevCenter