“Store Data Wherever You Want and Analyse It However You Like”

Microsoft have evolved and enhanced the SQL Server throughout the years, the most recent edition (SQL Server 2012) comprising of a broad range of features enabling businesses to make faster, more relevant decisions by availing of their entire IT infrastructure.

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is a cloud-ready information platform that will help organisations unlock breakthrough insights across the organisation and quickly build solutions to extend data across on-premises and public cloud. Business intelligence (BI) is critically important to organizations both large and small. In the latest release of SQL Server, there is no shortage of BI enhancements in addition to many other improvements. Some of the most praised features are as follows:

• Business Intelligence Semantic Model: SQL Server in concert with Office and SharePoint, helps you deliver BI across your organization through the familiar Office user experience and provides a rich set of platform capabilities to ensure credible, consistent data and support todays analysis, data warehousing, and Big Data needs.
• Big Data Support: allows you to unlock actionable insights from all your structured and unstructured data. Analyse Hadoop (free, Java-based programming framework) data with familiar tools, and at the same time enrich your information by connecting to the world’s data and services (Windows Azure Marketplace)
• PowerPivot: With SQL server 2012, Microsoft has improved the data analysis capabilities of PowerPivot for both the client-side (PowerPivot for Excel) and the server-side component (PowerPivot for SharePoint). This provides enhanced self-service BI functionality to all Microsoft Office users by integrating data from multiple sources more easily, creating reports and analytical applications faster.
• AlwaysOn: Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) – provides higher availability of SQL Server instance after failover through multisite failover clustering; improving site protection and the ability to define flexible failover policy to better control instance failover.
• AlwaysOn: Availability Groups (AG) – users will be able to failover multiple databases in groups instead of individually (cross-cluster migration), increasing availability and recovery time. SQL Server 2012 provides everything you need to address availability and reliability of data at every level of the enterprise taking database mirroring to a whole new level.
• Columnstore Indexes: data is grouped and stored in a flat, compressed column index, greatly reducing memory utilization on large queries.
• Contained Database: reduce or eliminate the dependencies that a database has on the SQL Server instance, making it easier to migrate a database to a new instance by storing the collation setting and the database login user IDs within the database; with less of the work involved in reproducing and validating these dependencies.

A comprehensive database management platform, SQL Server delivers the reliability, scalability, performance, and security your enterprise database demand.  There are three major areas in SQL Server 2012 that help deliver breakthrough insights: Rapid Data Exploration, Managed Self-Service Business Intelligence and Credible, Consistent Data. There are at least a dozen other features in SQL Server 2012 that enhance the data exploration capabilities of an organisation; thus providing a complete and integrated Business Intelligence and performance management solution; enabling revolutionary insight across all levels.