Myself and colleagues (mostly Sam Solieman, but also will Thompson) have been running a series of webcasts on SQL Server 2012. The ones we’ve run so far have been recorded, so you can watch them on demand. The recordings are on the Partner Learning Center, so you’ll need a Microsoft partner login to access them.

The sessions that have been run and recorded so far in this series are:

• SQL Server 2012 Introduction and Licensing
• AlwaysOn
• Power View and PowerPivot v2
• Business Intelligence Semantic Model
• SQL Server on Windows Core Edition (there were some audio issues on this session, so Sam rerecorded it)

The next webcast in the series is on Thursday 2nd February from 4pm. Sam will be talking about the security enhancements in SQL Server 2012.

Still to cover are:

• Security enhancements
• Master Data Services and Data Quality Services
• SharePoint integration and series wrap-up

To register for any of the upcoming sessions, go here.

The SQL Server team blog has posted recently about customers using SQL Server 2012 today. This post has five case studies of big customers who are on the early adopters programs for SQL Server, putting to use the new features of SQL Server 2012.

I’m going to be speaking at the International SharePoint Conference in London on 23rd to 25th April. My subject is: No Budget, No Time, No Permissions. It’s a case study of building a SharePoint site with no allocated resources. Come along to find out more…

Registration for the conference is open now.

This nice video has people giving their comments on their favourite features of SQL Server 2012.

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http://mssalesdemos.com now includes a demo machine for SQL Server 2012. This includes the Telco demo that was present in the BI X demo machine as well as new demos on SQL Server 2012 functionality. There’s a set of demos on PowerPivot, including the auto sales demo which has been shown at various events and one on the food consumed on picnics. There’s also a demo on the new Master Data Services functionality.

These demos have a distinctly BI flavour but the machine is configurable if you want to build some demos of your own.

This machine is available either hosted or as a download. Just be prepared to wait a long time for the download.

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If you’re a Microsoft partner and you’ve tried to find training courses and online learning offered by us, you’ll probably be familiar with the joys of the Partner Learning Center. The Partner Learning Center stores information on what sometimes feels like every training course ever offered to partners. It’s therefore a wonderful resource. It’s also, for obvious reasons, very tricky to figure out where to start. If you search for a common product name, such as SharePoint or SQL Server, you could get loads of results. Yes, you can filter the results so you’re not looking at classroom courses taking place a thousand miles away, but it’s still difficult to know where to start if you’re learning a technology from scratch.

Introducing: Microsoft Learning Plans.

When you log into this website, you can build learning plans based on various factors. If you’re trying to gain a competency, you can get a learning plan of technical training relating to that competency. Or you can choose a learning plan based on your role or a particular technology you’re interested in.

The end result is a list of available resources and online courses (and links to exams and/or classroom courses). A lot of the material is actually on the Partner Learning Center, but this way you know where to start and can work through the available material in a sensible order.

If you’re getting started with a piece of Microsoft technology, this website is a very valuable resource.

I’ve been playing around with Power View (formerly codename Project Crescent). I started with a simple PowerPivot file I’d created to analyse the transactions of a small dog grooming salon (I wanted something different from the usual Contoso demos). It was a simple matter to publish this PowerPivot file to a PowerPivot gallery in SharePoint 2010.

With the file saved to the gallery, I could click on the new icon to create my report (my screenshot still calls it Crescent, since I’m using CTP3 code).

This gave me a blank canvas from which to start creating my interactive report. I could quickly and easily create rich visualisations, including charts which move based on a timeline, with just a few clicks.

It’s also possible to save this visualisations as various views, making it simple to jump to different data representations to present conclusions from the analysis.

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I’m organising an event in Microsoft’s London office on 5th December. The name of the event is SharePoint: The Bigger Picture and the aim is to talk to partners who do some work with SharePoint but who aren’t taking advantage of all the capabilities. We’ll be talking about the range of high-end capabilities SharePoint can provide and the services opportunities involved for partners. The event should be an eye-opener to the potential value SharePoint can provide Microsoft partners.

We’ll have in attendence representatives of SharePoint training partner Combined Knowledge in case attendees want to get skilled up in new areas. We’ll also have a couple of established Gold partners speaking in case the attendee partners would prefer to go down a partnership route.

The event will be focused more on the business than the technical and will assume some prior experience with SharePoint.

If you’re interested in finding out more, the registration details are here.

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These guys at SQL PASS presented on using Kinect to interact with SQL. Create databases by raising your arms. Delete databases by kicking them away. Back up databases by bringing your arms back.

Awesome!

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SQL Server 2008 R2 comes with a lot of features and functionality. Even the Standard version has a long list of capabilities to set DBAs drooling. But then there’s the Enterprise version. A question that comes up, more often than we’d like, is, “Why would I need Enterprise?” If there are so many features available out of the box with SQL Server Standard, why go to the Enterprise version?

If you want to go into it feature-by-feature, the SQL Server website has a comparison site which allows you to look at the features under various headings and see which versions of the product those features are included in.

But if you don’t want to go through the whole list, here are my thoughts on some key ones.

Master Data Services

As a set of features, Master Data Services comes with SQL Server Enterprise but not with the Standard edition. MDS provides the technical framework of a master data management solution, letting organisations have control over their data. MDS helps companies ensure that their data is consistent, accurate and up to date, even if that data is spread across multiple applications and databases.

As a concept, master data management is a very powerful one. There are few companies who would say that they don’t want to be confident that their data is correct. If you’re building a business intelligence solution, you want to be sure that the data you’re starting from is valid. The best analysis in the world won’t give you reliable answers if you give it figures that are wildly incorrect. MDS can provide a master data database to store an authoritative source of information to be used in applications. It can also provide a framework of checks and rules to ensure that data stays consistent and correct across multiple applications if values are changed in one.

PowerPivot in SharePoint

PowerPivot starts off as a free download add-in for Excel. Users running Excel 2010 can install the client add-in and start creating powerful dashboards and applications using familiar pivot table interfaces that pull data from a range of sources, both on-premise and in the cloud.

When users want to share these PowerPivot files, that’s where the SharePoint add-in comes in. This lets users publish PowerPivot files to galleries in SharePoint where they can be viewed by others in the organisation. It also provides a management dashboard, so IT can control permissions to the files, audit changes and manage the refresh schedule for the data. This allows IT to have control over files produced quickly by end users.

The PowerPivot operational dashboard and SharePoint collaboration layer come with the Enterprise edition of SQL Server.

Auditing

SQL Server Enterprise allows you to set up automatic auditing of changes on your databases. You can have fine grained control over what events get logged. Depending on your data and application, auditing might not be optional. Some industries have regulations regarding data meaning that you need to be able to show who has accessed and amended values in a database. If that’s the case for you, the Enterprise edition is almost essential.

High Availability

For some databases and systems, downtime is not an option. Sometimes, an application going down means that money isn’t coming in. For those applications, a high-availability strategy is needed. SQL Server Standard includes some features to enable high availability, but the Enterprise edition brings more. Features like database snapshots, mirrored backups and fast restore mean that when something goes wrong, a back-up system can be online and in the right state to carry on.

Scalability

SQL Server Enterprise can scale more than the Standard edition. In hard numbers, Enterprise can run on 8 CPUs instead of Standard’s 4, utilising 2TB of memory instead of 64GB. The maximum database size is the same (524PB) for both, but the limits on CPUs and memory will affect the performance of a big SQL deployment. Some of the options around indexing will also make a big difference on performance when the database size and usage gets large.

These are such some examples of areas where SQL Server Enterprise provides a significant advantage over SQL Server Standard. For the full list, check here.

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