Microsoft SQL Server 2014 was released April 1st 2014. There are many organizations who are only now considering rolling out SQL Server 2012. The effort involved in planning and testing commercial products and custom line of business applications with a new database server version is often one of the largest barriers to upgrading. However, there are some compelling reasons to consider upgrading to SQL Server 2014 earlier than later especially when it comes to delivering comprehensive Business Intelligence solutions to your organization and its decision makers.
SQL Server 2014 delivers on that promise to provide the right tools and insights to everyone anytime and anywhere. There is very little point in gathering data if it can’t be analyzed easily and quickly. In today’s competitive, fast paced and mobile environment, businesses require better access to data to make timely informed decisions. Organizations can better direct the competitive course of their business with user-oriented self-service business intelligence.
Performance, scalability and high availability enhancements are key components for fast analytics. Each version of SQL Server since 2005 has had significant performance improvements and 2014 is no different. In fact it’s the most significant yet.
The biggest performance change in SQL Server 2014 is the support for in-memory OLTP. You can place those tables and stored procedures that need a performance boost into memory. By moving those select tables and stored procedures into memory, you can dramatically reduce I/O and improve performance of your transactional based applications. SQL Server 2014's in-memory columnstore can increase data warehouse queries anywhere from 10 to 100x. Also, SQL Server 2014 with its enhanced integration with Windows Serer 2012 R2, can now scale up to 64 virtual processors and 1TB of memory when running on a virtual machine.
The new analytics platform in SQL Server 2014 is "big data in a box" according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
Microsoft Analytics Platform System (APS) is a big data analytics appliance for SQL Server. It brings Microsoft's parallel processing data warehouse technology (PDW) together with Hadoop using PolyBase. It enables queries to span across relational data stored in PDW and non-relational data Hadoop that is stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Users can quickly and easily use tools such as PowerPivot to connect to the PDW and pull in data from the PDW tables as well and external Hadoop tables without having to understand Hadoop or HDFS.
The performance enhancements alone offer a compelling reason to upgrade. Combined with the new analytics platform system or even just then enhanced Data Tools for BI and PowerQuery provide further enticements for considering an upgrade.
For more information SQL Server 2014, please see microsoft.com/sql.
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Ease the pain on testing using modern.ie!
As web developers we need tools to test our web applications across all browsers. If you asked the majority of developers which browser causes more issues on debugging, they would say Internet Explorer (No offense Microsoft). But most companies, specifically the majority of big corporations, use Internet Explorer because Microsoft is the only one that offers the most robust enterprise deployment management tools of any browser vendor. Microsoft touted research conducted by Forrester that said that 96 percent of businesses standardize on a single browser because it saves them money.
As web developers, we know older versions of Internet Explorer are still lingering out there, so what do we do now? Aside from installing at least three browsers from different vendors on our PC to test cross browser compatibility, we also still need to test on different versions of IE. Finally, in early 2013, Microsoft launched “modern.ie” to help developers spend more time on innovating versus more time on testing.
The Modern.ie website has a collection of free tools and resources for developers that can be downloaded from the website. The most useful tools that I personally like are the Test VMs for different IE versions.
All the Test Virtual Machines for Internet Explorer are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. These VM’s are a real time saver. You can download all the RAR files that are appropriate for your testing needs and all of them can be loaded in one PC.
You will be surprised, that you can even download a test VM for Internet explorer 6, running in XP!
Another useful free tool that I use from modern.ie is the “Site Scan”. As the name suggest, it scans your site for common coding problems. Just type in the URL on the given input field, and click on “Scan”. You can also download the open source version in GitHub.
This tool will help detect compatibility problems on IE that prevent users from getting a better experience in their web apps. After entering the desired URL for site scan, it will produce results indicating a check mark that means pass or “!” for suggested enhancements.
So now it's been a year since the website modern.ie was launched and I would agree that it probably did saved a million of development hours for web developers out there for testing web sites using the free tools. Less time testing ! more time coding!
We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Eleanor Boado to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.
We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.
Warm regards,
Point Alliance Team
As web developers, we know older versions of Internet Explorer are still lingering out there, so what do we do now? Aside from installing at least three browsers from different vendors on our PC to test cross browser compatibility, we also still need to test on different versions of IE. Finally, in early 2013, Microsoft launched “modern.ie” to help developers spend more time on innovating versus more time on testing.
The Modern.ie website has a collection of free tools and resources for developers that can be downloaded from the website. The most useful tools that I personally like are the Test VMs for different IE versions.
All the Test Virtual Machines for Internet Explorer are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. These VM’s are a real time saver. You can download all the RAR files that are appropriate for your testing needs and all of them can be loaded in one PC.
You will be surprised, that you can even download a test VM for Internet explorer 6, running in XP!
Another useful free tool that I use from modern.ie is the “Site Scan”. As the name suggest, it scans your site for common coding problems. Just type in the URL on the given input field, and click on “Scan”. You can also download the open source version in GitHub.
This tool will help detect compatibility problems on IE that prevent users from getting a better experience in their web apps. After entering the desired URL for site scan, it will produce results indicating a check mark that means pass or “!” for suggested enhancements.
So now it's been a year since the website modern.ie was launched and I would agree that it probably did saved a million of development hours for web developers out there for testing web sites using the free tools. Less time testing ! more time coding!
We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Eleanor Boado to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.
We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.
Warm regards,
Point Alliance Team
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
MVC Bundling
The amount of style sheets and JavaScript files included with a website these days is staggering. As you develop solutions, it is becoming important to be aware of the amount of different style sheets and JavaScript files you are forcing the user to download on each request. A simple way of limiting the amount of these requests, while keeping your code separated in a logical way, is to implement bundling in your MVC Project.
If you have 12 different CSS files and 8 different JavaScript files in your solution, it’s easy to combine these into two different requests. In your App_Start folder, create a new class called BundleConfig. Within the class, create a public static void method called RegisterBundles() which will accept a BundleCollection object as a parameter. You then will add a ScriptBundle collection, and a StyleBundle collection to the BundleCollection.
See example below.
Now, in your Application_Start() method within the Global.asax file, you call your bundling provider. A good idea is to enable optimizations only when building in release mode. When optimizations are enabled, the bundle will automatically combine each ScriptBundle and StyleBundle into one request, as well as minify each result.
The last step is to modify your _layout.cshtml file to reference the bundles. In the BundleConfig file that we created, we created a name for each of the ScriptBundle and StyleBundles. You reference these in your layout using the following format.
That’s it! You have now optimized your website, limiting the amount of requests done per page per user while allowing separation of your style sheets and scripts during development.
We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Kevin Doig to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.
We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.
Warm regards,
Point Alliance Team
If you have 12 different CSS files and 8 different JavaScript files in your solution, it’s easy to combine these into two different requests. In your App_Start folder, create a new class called BundleConfig. Within the class, create a public static void method called RegisterBundles() which will accept a BundleCollection object as a parameter. You then will add a ScriptBundle collection, and a StyleBundle collection to the BundleCollection.
See example below.
Now, in your Application_Start() method within the Global.asax file, you call your bundling provider. A good idea is to enable optimizations only when building in release mode. When optimizations are enabled, the bundle will automatically combine each ScriptBundle and StyleBundle into one request, as well as minify each result.
The last step is to modify your _layout.cshtml file to reference the bundles. In the BundleConfig file that we created, we created a name for each of the ScriptBundle and StyleBundles. You reference these in your layout using the following format.
That’s it! You have now optimized your website, limiting the amount of requests done per page per user while allowing separation of your style sheets and scripts during development.
We hope you have found this week’s edition of "To The Point" by Kevin Doig to be helpful and informative. Look out for our next week instalment as we continue to explore unique topics from business to the latest technology.
We want to hear your point! If you have any ideas, suggestions or any questions about our weekly blog, please contact us at: info@pointalliance.com.
Warm regards,
Point Alliance Team
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