Microsoft
has released to manufacturing the newest version of its relational database,
SQL Server 2012, the company announced Tuesday. The software will be available
for customer purchase on April 1. With this release, Microsoft is positioning
SQL Server as a tool that can help organizations analyze large amounts of
unstructured data, an increasingly popular practice called big data. "With the continually decreasing costs
of storage and compute, we've moved into an era where it is more affordable for
organizations to store everything," said Doug Leland, Microsoft general
manager of its business platform marketing group. "Of course, the
challenge is how to derive insight from all these signals." SQL Server
2012 is "a modern data platform that embraces the world of traditional
structured data and brings in the world of unstructured big data," Leland
said. The software is designed to help "customers keep pace with the
change and help them evolve as their needs change."
The update will be the first major one to the database package
since the 2010 release of SQL Server 2008 R2. The company has touted advancements in three broad areas for this release:
better mission-critical readiness, better business intelligence tools and
greater compatibility with cloud computing. Additionally, with this release,
Microsoft is promoting SQL Server as an essential tool for helping
organizations execute big data analysis. SQL Server can act as a link between
unstructured data platforms such as Hadoop and more traditional data
warehouse-based business intelligence tools offered by Microsoft. Using SQL
Server in conjunction with Hadoop, "customers will be able to derive
insights from the data," using tools such as Excel PowerPivot and the SQL
Server 2012's Power View, Leland said. SQL Server 2012 has been modified to
work with Microsoft's Azure-based deployment of Hadoop. Last October, the
company launched, as a preview
service, a Hadoop service on its Azure cloud. For the SQL Server 2012 release,
availability of this Hadoop Azure service has been expanded to 2,000 users,
from 400 in the initial launch. It plans a full release of the service by the
end of June.
No comments:
Post a Comment