Image by James Shearer

Its a RDBMs, no its a ColumnStore, no its a cloud integrated storage platform… Oh its actually SQL Server 2014!

Exciting news as the new (project code-name: Hekaton) SQL Server 2014 is community technology preview (CTP1) is out and can be downloaded and evaluated by the community.

There is a host of exciting and long awaited features this release will be dishing out to the community, including finally a “usable” version of ColumnStore (xVelocity) indexes that are update-able, enhanced and new AlwaysOn features,statistics partitioning, SSD caching and many other cool features and functionality. For a full list checkout Brent Ozar’s post on everything you need to know about SQL 2014.

Microsoft has also edged closer to its vision of Cloud OS,  which is the idea of presenting a hybrid software platform that is not only cloud ready, but also integrates with cloud based solutions right down to the core. Part of this vision is Windows Server 2012 R2 (CP), which could also be trialed as it is out on Community Preview.

Anyway, happy trialing. As for me, I have my annual holiday soon, which now has been taken over by this awesome news!