Top BI Features of MS SQL Server 2012
March 19th, 2012 / No Comments » / by admin
Microsoft has introduced SQL Server 2012 to the world (out 1st April) with a number of new features exclusive to this version only. DBAs will be happy at the announcement of such facades of this release as ‘AlwaysOn’ availability groups, user-defined server roles or enhanced auditing features; however it is the BI components additions/changes that really define this version as class-leading. Microsoft has been saying for a while that the core data base engine is already very good thus concentrating on the BI functionality in more details and it certainly shows. Analytics and BI gained a number of features; some of the most prominent ones are as follows:
- Columnstore Indexes — This a powerful new feature that is completely unique to SQL Server. They are special type of read-only index designed to be use with Data Warehouse queries. Basically, data is grouped and stored in a flat, compressed column index, greatly reducing I/O and memory utilization on large queries.
- BI Semantic Model — This is replacing the Analysis Services Unified Dimensional Model (or cubes most people referred to them). It’s a hybrid model that allows one data model will support all BI experiences in SQL Server. Additionally, this will allow for some really professional text infographics.
- PowerView — You may have heard of this under the name “Project Crescent” it is a fairly powerful self-service BI toolkit that allows users to create mash ups of BI reports from all over the Enterprise.
- Big Data Support — Introduced at the PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) conference last year, Microsoft announced a partnership with Hadoop provider Cloudera. One part of this involves MS releasing an ODBC driver for SQL Server that will run on a Linux platform. Additionally, Microsoft is building connectors for Hadoop, which is an extremely popular NoSQL platform. With this announcement, Microsoft has made a clear move into this very rapidly growing space.
