Microsoft has announced great news for all those who love data – the newest edition of their database, SQL Server 2012, has been released to manufacturing.
This new edition represents a very significant leap forward in terms of the enterprise high availability and disaster recovery with AlwaysOn (think readable secondaries and automatic fail-over to any of the availability group secondaries), data visualization capabilities (think PowerView) and what is also extremely important – the development process improvements (SSDT – SQL Server Development Tools).
For me, there is no doubt, that this version represents the most significant improvement at least since SQL Server 2005, especially because of the new enterprise capabilities and because of the SQL Server Development Tools. The SQL Server Development Tools project, or in short SSDT –Â is a new development tools based on Visual Studio, which is looking to unite the experience of everyone working with SQL Server(Devs, DBAs & BI) and bring it to a brand new level of efficiency.
Besides bringing a lot of great tools into one, one of the best things about SSDT is that its free. Yes, free as in beer. ;) And supporting editions of SQL Server since 2005 SP3. I am extremely excited about it, and I have been doing some presentations on it since Decemeber 2010, so I am looking into writing more about my experiences with it in the nearest future (if my time will allow it) :)
You can download the RTM Trial version of SQL Server at the Microsoft site and also here is the direct link to the first version of the SQL Server Development Tools.
For those who are looking for a free version of the SQL Server, follow this link to get access to the SQL Server 2012 Express and LocalDb Editions.