I’ve been keeping up with the PASS developments from Twitter (check out #sqlPASS), and from the many bloggers I follow regularly. I have to say this week has been most exciting! There’s a lot of awesome stuff coming soon available now, with the release of SQL Server 2010 (Denali). I’ve already downloaded my copy, and I’ll begin installing it later today.
From the information already released I know they’ve put a ton of effort into High Availability and Disaster Recovery. To that end, today we saw a presentation on SQL’s AlwaysOn technology. Setting up fail over clusters appears to get much easier with 2011. You can now also fail over multiple databases at once. Good news, since I’ve never worked in an environment where the environment only depended on a single database.
Also with this new technology you can set your secondary(ies) to read mode. Imagine this. You want to run backups more often, but you can’t afford the hit on your production server. No problem, run the backup on your secondary. Your primary is none the wiser. Nice, right? How about this:
An important business user calls you reporting slow response times to a query he’s running. But in development you don’t see an issue. Hit the secondary, no impact to your primary, and you have a better shot of finding the issue. Of course, if the primary is just busy, you’ll still have to monitor the health of your primary… but wait. AlwaysOn has that too.
For me there was just a tease that they’ve put more work into XEvents. I’ll have more tools to troubleshoot performance issues in 2011. But no specifics. Oh well, that’s what the MSDN is for! I’ll let you know what I find.
Oh, they also mentioned a little something that will fix a minor headache. When you move a database from one server to another, you have to set up the login on the new server too. Get this, now, if you set it up properly… your logins can move with your databases! Awesome, right?
They also have built a bridge between your file system and database. Looks like there is some powerful, yet possibly dangerous, new features available with FILETABLE. I’ll have to do some digging. But it sounds really cool being able to query your file system, and even interact with it, natively, from SSMS or via your database layer in your application. Again, cool!
They’ve added some cool stuff to TSQL too. Welcome to 1999, TSQL supports paging. Yes, the one big thing I felt was missing from MS SQL but was in MySQL was the ability to page through your records without having to build a custom paging solution each time. It’s here baby! Oh and sequence generator…. I could do some real damage with that. Custom sequence number generation. Hmm… I’m going to have to toy with that one!
I’m going to wrap this up with what they call Project Jeneau. It’s their effort to merge Visual Studio with SSMS. Before I had a lot of reservations on this. But now, with the new designers, the multi-monitor support, the one click export to filesystem options. I may have to reconsider! I can’t wait to play with that too! Hopefully I don’t have to install this in a VM to keep my machine stability I have now.
“Commit all to database….” mmmm… Good stuff!
Hey, let me know what you think of the new features. Any snafus installing? Let me know what you’re seeing!