SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 1 is now available
One year ago, Satya Nadella spoke in San Francisco to launch SQL Server 2014. Today, we are pleased to announce the release of SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 1 (SP1). The Service Pack is available for download on the Microsoft Download Center. As part of our continued commitment to software excellence for our customers, this upgrade is available to all customers with existing SQL Server 2014 deployments.
SQL Server 2014 SP1 contains fixes to issues that have been reported through our customer feedback platforms and Hotfix solutions provided in SQL Server 2014 CU 1 up to and including CU 5, as well as a rollup of fixes previously shipped in SQL Server 2012 SP2.
A few of the customer-requested updates in Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP1 are:
- Column store performance is improved when batch mode operators spill over to disk. A new XEvent provides insights into column store inserts.
- Several issues in buffer pool extension SSD configuration are addressed, including the ability to do instant initialization of the buffer pool extension file.
- Certain queries compile faster when using new cardinality estimator, and other cardinality estimation query plans are more efficient when using TF-4199.
- The scalability benefits of two trace flags (TF-1236, TF-9024) are applied automatically.
- Backup header information retrieval works better with encrypted backups.
Customers like Samsung Electro-Mechanics are already seeing the benefits of upgrading to SQL Server 2014. Samsung improved OLTP performance up to 24 times and DW up to 22 times when they upgraded to SQL Server 2014. SBI Liquidity Market sped up their transaction performance by tenfold when they adopted SQL Server 2014 in-memory OLTP.
For information about upgrading to SQL Server 2014, see the tools and resources available at www.microsoft.com/sqlserverupgrade. To trial SQL Server 2014, visit the SQL Server 2014 Evaluation Center.
For more highlights of the release, please read the Knowledge Base Article for Microsoft SQL Server 2014 SP1. To obtain SQL Server 2014 SP1 with its improved supportability, please visit the links below. SQL Server 2014 with SP1 will be available in additional venues including the Volume Licensing center and via Microsoft Update starting May 1, 2015.
