SQL Server Denali
At the Microsoft World Partner Conference yesterday, Microsoft officially released SQL Server Denali CTP 3 -- the latest community preview of its cloud-ready information platform. There are a number of improvements to this latest version including:
- AlwaysOn: Offers greater availability
- Project Apollo: Fast performance thanks to this new column store index
- Project Crescent: A new data exploration and visualization tool
- BI Semantic Model: a single model for BI applications that provides a consistent view across your data sources
- Excel: A Master Data Services add-in for Excel
There are also a number of data management tools available in the Windows Azure Marketplace from third party providers.
You can download CTP3 and give it a test run.
Partners Announce their Support for Denali
It goes with a new release that partners will come out and announce their support for new product versions.
- OpenText (news, site) announced that its enterprise content management system will support Denali, being named a Microsoft Global Launch Partner.
- Panorma Software (news, site) announced that its business intelligence suite will seamlessly integrate with the BI Semantic Model offering its customers a single view of its data.
- Epicor announced its enterprise performance management software will take advantage of the performance enhancements in the new version.