SQL 2014 - early view

It seems like only yesterday that SQL 2012 was released but 2014 in around the corner already. It’s already at CTP2 (community technology preview two) and is looking interesting.

As Microsoft has moved to a quicker release cycle it will become more and more difficult it stay up to date. Indeed, many of the big hit features of 2014 are not relevant to many organisations so there will be a lot of customers who stay on SQL 2012 or wait for the 2000-next. However, these features might be exactly what you need right now so let’s have a look.

The big hitter in this release is Hekaton and its related features. Hekaton is a Greek word meaning hundred and that describes what Hekaton offers, performance improvements of one hundred times for transactional processing. Wow, one hundred times! The changes comes from moving to an in-memory model for the relational engine. This removes the impact of moving data between disk and memory and radically reduces the impact of memory based operations. 

The Greek phalanx comes to SQL 2014 - image by Andrew Becraft

Moving to in memory is, in many ways, caching up with industry trends. In the past disk access was thousands of times slower than memory, server didn’t have enough memory to keep most of their data in disk and it was assumed that servers were not trust worthy enough to keep their data is memory only. These have changed with the move to SSDs (solid state disks) for storage, increases in memory and server resilience improvements. These days “memory is the new disk” (Jim Gray) and the move to in memory is gathering speed.

Hekaton’s includes in-memory “latch less” data access model, improved algorithms for data access, natively compiled stored procedures and other associated features including delayed durability for transactions, updatable column store indexes and AlwaysOn improvements. There’s a lot in there and it’ll take a while to digest the full set of changes.

As expected, there is also better integration between on premise and Azure databases. On premise databases can now backup to the cloud easier (building on a SQL2012 service pack feature) and leverage a new managed service for Azure cloud backup. Built-in backup encryption is thrown in for good measure, while this is a small feature it’s an essential for backing up to the cloud so helps to complete the cloud picture.

In BI, the biggest feature is support added to the PowerView for the multi-dimensional model. Like the backup to Azure, this was already available as a service pack plus update. Not much on this list, but that will happen when releases are so close together.

A few extras should be added by the time SQL 2014 gets to RTM (ready to manufacture).