How Is This Book Organized? SQL Server 2012, like its predecessors, is more than a database engine. It is a collection of components you can implement either separately or as a group to form a scalable, cloud-ready information platform. In broad terms, this cloud-ready information platform consists of two categories: those that help you manage data and those that help you deliver business intelligence (BI). Accordingly, we divided this book into two parts to focus on the new capabilities for each of these areas. Part 1, “Database Administration,” is written with the database administrator (DBA) in mind and introduces readers to the numerous innovations in SQL Server 2012. Chapter 1, “SQL Server 2012 Editions and Engine Enhancements,” discusses the key enhancements affiliated with availability, scalability, performance, manageability, security, and programmability. It then outlines the different SQL Server 2012 editions, hardware and software requirements and installation, upgrade, and migration strategies available. In Chapter 2, “High-Availability and Disaster-Recovery Enhancements” readers learn about the new AlwaysOn features in SQL Server 2012—specifically, AlwaysOn Availability Groups and how they can be used to achieve a high level of confidence in your data and related capabilities. Chapter 3, “Performance and Scalability,” introduces a new index type called columnstore and explains how it can be leveraged to significantly accelerate data-warehousing workloads and other queries that are similar in nature. Chapter 4, “Security Enhancements,” covers the new security enhancements associated with the product, such as security manageability improvements and audit and authentication enhancements. Finally, Chapter 5, “Programmability and Beyond-Relational Enhancements,” discusses the new beyond-relational enhancements positively impacting unstructured data, including refinements to existing technology features such as full-text search, spatial data, and FILESTREAM, as well as brand new capabilities like FileTables and statistical semantic search. Part 2, “Business Intelligence Development,” is written for readers who need to understand how SQL Server 2012 can help them more easily perform data integration, data quality improvements, master data management, data analysis, and reporting tasks. Chapter 6, “Integration Services,” explores the comprehensive changes in this release affecting development, deployment, and administration of Integration Services packages. In Chapter 7, “Data Quality Services,” readers learn about the newest BI component available in SQL Server 2012 for centralizing data-quality activities, including how to store data-quality rules in a knowledge base and how to automate the discovery of rules. Chapter 8, “Master Data Services,” reviews the improved interface of this feature that simplifies the implementation, workflows, and administration of master data management. Chapter 9, “Analysis Services and PowerPivot,” introduces the new tabular server mode, shows how to develop tabular models, and describes enhancements to the Analysis Services platform and PowerPivot for Excel capabilities. Last, Chapter 10, “Reporting Services,” covers the improvements in SharePoint integration and details the self-service capabilities available with the new ad hoc reporting tool, Power View.
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Introduction