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New Features Overview
The release of Microsoft SQL Server 2012 has introduced many new features that increase scalability,
manageability, availability, programmability, and security across the enterprise. With many
organizations focused on consolidation and virtualization, this couldn’t have come at a better time. As
the demand for data keeps growing and security and compliance keep tightening, the role of the
database administrator (DBA) has become an increasingly critical part of the organization. It is
important for every DBA to have a good understanding of the tools available to help maintain a highly
available, secure environment.
This book will cover the techniques you need to understand to implement and manage a successful
database environment. After a brief overview of some of the enhancements, you will learn how to make
intelligent decisions when choosing an installation or upgrade path. You will also learn how to manage a
secure and consistent database environment by implementing policies across the organization. By
learning how to automate tedious administrative tasks, you can focus on more important tasks, like
performance tuning. Finally, we will look at what the future holds for database administration, as well as
give you the resources necessary to excel as a DBA.
This chapter presents an overview of several new features available in SQL Server 2012.Although this
chapter will not cover every detail of every new feature available in SQL Server 2012, it will provide a
brief introduction to many of the major enhancements. We dig deeper into many of these features as we
progress through the book.
Availability Enhancements
Availability is becoming a greater concern with many organizations wanting to achieve four and five
nines. Since achieving four nines allows for less than one hour of downtime per year and achieving five
nines allows for less than six minutes per year, living up to this expectation is not an easy task. There
have been improvements in many areas to help achieve this goal, including the addition of the new
AlwaysOn functionality.
Online Index Rebuilds
SQL Server 2005 introduced the ability to rebuild an index online with a few limitations that have
remained consistent through SQL Server 2008 R2. First, you could not rebuild an XML or Spatial (SQL
2008 or later) index online. Second, you could not rebuild an index online if the index contained the
large object datatype columns xml, varchar(max), nvarchar(max), varbinary(max), image, text, or ntext.
Prior to SQL Server 2012, if you needed to do online index maintenance on indexes with these
limitations, your only option was to reorganize the index.
Starting with SQL Server 2012, you can now perform online index rebuilds for indexes containing
xml, varchar(max), nvarchar(max), or varbinary(max) data types. You still cannot rebuild indexes online
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