SQL Server 2012 Mission Critical Confidence

Required Uptime and Protection

Deliver required uptime and data protection, server to cloud without wasting time and money

• Help reduce planned and unplanned downtime with the new integrated high availability and disaster recovery solution, SQL Server AlwaysOn.
• Achieve maximum application availability and data protection with options to configure multiple secondaries and ability to quickly failover and recover applications.
• Significantly reduce OS patching with new support for Windows Server Core.
• Maintain uptime during maintenance operations using enhanced online operations and eliminate planned downtime on Hyper-V environment using Live Migration.
• Simplify deployment and management of high availability requirements using integrated configuration and monitoring tools.

Blazing-Fast Performance

Gain breakthrough and predictable performance backed by industry-leading benchmarks

• Make a bet on a trusted platform that continuously leads in industry-relevant TPC-E and TPC-H performance benchmarks† and release over release SQL Server is SAP-certified to run some of the industry’s most demanding workloads.
• Significantly boost query performance, by up to 100x for star join and similar queries, using the new column store index
• Support blazing fast queries with dramatic improvements to Full-Text Search that offer serious performance and scale advances.
• Accelerate the performance of I/O intensive workloads by cutting growing volumes of data 50-60%†† with compression capabilities.
• Gain predictable performance for concurrent and mixed workloads by defining resource usage across different applications with Resource Governor.
• Analyze query execution plans, capture database activity, optimize indexes and structures and help ensure consistent query performance with familiar, easy-to-use management tools.

† SQL Server benchmarks
††SQL Server compression

Organizational Security and Compliance

Enable compliance with built-in security and IT controls

• Help protect data with built-in encryption capabilities that help protect confidential information without changes to the application.
• Help ensure compliance and increase manageability related to auditing with audit resilience, filtering, user-defined audit, and enablement across all SQL Server editions.
• Increase manageability and decrease complexity of database schema through Default Schema for Groups by allowing a default database schema for Windows group user accounts.
• Easily manage permissions around data access with user-defined server roles to support separation of duties.
• Help ensure security-enhanced deployments and minimize surface-area attacks by enabling only required services through Configuration Manager—built-in services turned off by default.
• Help secure end user data analytics with built-in IT controls, including new SharePoint and Microsoft Active Directory security models for end user reports published and shared in SharePoint.

Peace of Mind

Help ensure peace of mind with premier services and support, a trusted partner ecosystem, and a wealth of free tools.

• Microsoft’s Premier Mission Critical Support and the Microsoft Critical Advantage Program, provide the services and support needed for companies to establish the proactive IT environment and operations necessary to deliver maximum availability and performance to their Mission Critical Applications.
• Microsoft offers a broad ecosystem of partners with more than 640,000 partners, including best-of-breed applications from vendors such as SAP, Temenos, and Kronos as well as partnerships with leading OEMs like Dell, HP, and Fujitsu.
• Microsoft delivers piece of mind with the licensing program, Enterprise Application Program, which offers unlimited support to customers with specific software assurance plans.
• Unlike many software companies, Microsoft offers free access to software service packs.
• Quickly plan for an upgrade or migration with a wealth of no-fee tools developed by Microsoft engineers and available online.