There has been lots of speculation in the SQL Server community as to what the official name of the next release of Microsoft’s flagship database product SQL Server will be. Today I made a discovery on one of Microsoft’s very own sites that indicates that the name will not follow the “R2” naming convention that has been named in the past.
At the PASS summit last year Microsoft officially released information about a new feature called “Hekaton” in the next release which you can read about here. As this is such a breakthrough piece of functionality it stands to reason that this will not be a minor “R2” style release but a major release. Incidentally Intel also have a major/minor release strategy which they label the Intel Tick Tock Model and is an interesting read for all you hardware geeks out there (you know who you are).
It was widely believed that “SQL Server 2012 R2” would be the name of the next version mainly due to articles such as “Microsoft may be stepping up the delivery pace” on CNET which showed what was believed to be a Microsoft authored roadmap. This document showed SQL Server 2012 R2 being released in H2 of 2014.
So, why do I believe that 2012 R2 is not the next name? Well, the reason is that whilst I was looking for a whitepaper (part of my Learn something new each day mantra) I came across something quite astonishing. The image below clearly shows that Microsoft currently intend for the product to be called “SQL Server 2014”. At the time of writing, this link will show the same screen http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb418471(v=sql.10).aspx how long it will remain active I do not know. Unfortunately all the links do point back to current or previous versions.
Whether this will be the official name at release remains to be seen, there is of course the chance that it may slip into 2015.
