SQL Server 2012 is Microsoft’s latest cloud-ready information platform. Organizations can use SQL
Server 2012 to efficiently protect, unlock, and scale the power of their data across the desktop,
mobile device, datacenter, and either a private or public cloud. Building on the success of the SQL
Server 2008 R2 release, SQL Server 2012 has made a strong impact on organizations worldwide with
its significant capabilities. It provides organizations with mission-critical performance and availability,
as well as the potential to unlock breakthrough insights with pervasive data discovery across the
organization. Finally, SQL Server 2012 delivers a variety of hybrid solutions you can choose from. For
example, an organization can develop and deploy applications and database solutions on traditional
nonvirtualized environments, on appliances, and in on-premises private clouds or off-premises public
clouds. Moreover, these solutions can easily integrate with one another, offering a fully integrated
hybrid solution. Figure 1-1 illustrates the Cloud Ready Information Platform ecosystem.
To prepare readers for SQL Server 2012, this chapter examines the new SQL Server 2012 features,
capabilities, and editions from a database administrator’s perspective. It also discusses SQL Server
2012 hardware and software requirements and installation strategies.
Now more than ever, organizations require a trusted, cost-effective, and scalable database platform
that offers mission-critical confidence, breakthrough insights, and flexible cloud-based offerings.
These organizations face ever-changing business conditions in the global economy and challenges
such as IT budget constraints, the need to stay competitive by obtaining business insights, and
the ability to use the right information at the right time. In addition, organizations must always be
adjusting because new and important trends are regularly changing the way software is developed
and deployed. Some of these new trends include data explosion (enormous increases in data usage),
consumerization IT, big data (large data sets), and private and public cloud deployments.
Microsoft has made major investments in the SQL Server 2012 product as a whole; however, the
new features and breakthrough capabilities that should interest database administrators (DBAs) are
divided in the chapter into the following categories: Availability, Manageability, Programmability,
Scalability and Performance, and Security. The upcoming sections introduce some of the new features and capabilities; however, other chapters in this book conduct a deeper explanation of the major technology investments.
Availability Enhancements
A tremendous amount of high-availability enhancements were added to SQL Server 2012, which is
sure to increase both the confidence organizations have in their databases and the maximum uptime
for those databases. SQL Server 2012 continues to deliver database mirroring, log shipping, and replication.
However, it now also offers a new brand of technologies for achieving both high availability
and disaster recovery known as AlwaysOn. Let’s quickly review the new high-availability enhancement
AlwaysOn:
- AlwaysOn Availability Groups For DBAs, AlwaysOn Availability Groups is probably themost highly anticipated feature related to the Database Engine for DBAs. This new capability protects databases and allows for multiple databases to fail over as a single unit. Better data redundancy and protection is achieved because the solution supports up to four secondary replicas. Of these four secondary replicas, up to two secondaries can be configured as synchronous secondaries to ensure the copies are up to date. The secondary replicas can reside within a datacenter for achieving high availability within a site or across datacenters for disaster recovery. In addition, AlwaysOn Availability Groups provide a higher return on investment because hardware utilization is increased as the secondaries are active, readable, and can be leveraged to offload backups, reporting, and ad hoc queries from the primary replica. The solution is tightly integrated into SQL Server Management Studio, is straightforward to deploy, and supports either shared storage or local storage. Figure 1-2 illustrates an organization with a global presence achieving both high availability and disaster recovery for mission-critical databases using AlwaysOn Availability Groups. In addition, the secondary replicas are being used to offload reporting and backups.
- AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances (FCI) AlwaysOn Failover Cluster Instances provides superior instance-level protection using Windows Server Failover Clustering and shared storage. However, with SQL Server 2012 there are a tremendous number of enhancements to improve availability and reliability. First, FCI now provides support for multi-subnet failover clusters. These subnets, where the FCI nodes reside, can be located in the same datacenter or in geographically dispersed sites. Second, local storage can be leveraged for the TempDB database. Third, faster startup and recovery times are achieved after a failover transpires. Finally, improved cluster health-detection policies can be leveraged, offering a stronger and more flexible failover.
- Support for Windows Server Core Installing SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core is now supported. Windows Server Core is a scaled-down edition of the Windows operating system and requires approximately 50 to 60 percent fewer reboots when patching servers. This translates to greater SQL Server uptime and increased security. Server Core deployment options using Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and higher are required. Chapter 2, “High-Availability and Disaster-Recovery Options,” discusses deploying SQL Server 2012 on Server Core, including the features supported.
- Recovery Advisor A new visual timeline has been introduced in SQL Server Management Studio to simplify the database restore process. As illustrated in Figure 1-3, the scroll bar beneath the timeline can be used to specify backups to restore a database to a point in time.
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