At least not for SQL Server. There was an announcement last week at TechEd that the next version of SQL Server will be coming in the next year and will be named SQL Server 2014. No SQL Server 2012 R2, which I think is a good decision. As much as I don't think naming much matters for many things, releasing a second product with it's own set of patches, under the moniker of a previous product, makes for confusion. No shortage of people have tried to restore databases from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2008, or apply patches built for one, on the other.

Three main products were announced: Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2, and SQL Server 2014. I still don't understand why the branding for the other products hasn't changed, but as long as SQL Server is moving forward, I'm happy. All three products have lots of changes, but some of the biggest ones are in linking more features from the cloud platform, specifically Azure, to those products. I'm not sure what it means for the other products, but for SQL Server, I was surprised, and a little scared, by this quote:

 “there is no such thing as a SQL Server team anymore. There is, in fact, no code base called SQL Server. There’s only one code base, which is the Azure database code base.” 

It's been printed a few times that Microsoft is focused on Azure first, and their development will occur there first and slowly make its into the boxed product. I can understand that, even if I don't like it. I still think Azure needs competition outside of Microsoft, but we'll see what happens as development moves forward.

In terms of SQL Server 2014, there are lots of new items to be excited about. The in-memory "Hekaton" structures, updateable columnstore indexes, AlwaysOn expanded to 8 secondaries with online indexing and more. I am anxious to see how the sub-roles work for security, and if we can allow more administration without access to data, I'm very interested. The Resource Governor that handles IO is another one I've wanted for quite a few versions.

I don't know when we'll be able to test things, and I don't know when we'll get the RTM bits, but if you have instances you've been thinking about moving to SQL Server 2012, I might hold off and see how the first CTP shakes out.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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