Many are waiting for some big "15" announcement of
SharePoint, and I believe these enhancements in SQL 2012 previously known as
code name "Denali" are worth looking at. I'm now telling our architects we need
to pay attention to this in a big way as we architect our SharePoint 2010 farms
for BI and in our Disaster Recovery plans of today. Here we go!!
1. SQL Reporting Services is now a SharePoint
2010 Service Application
One of the headache's of SharePoint and BI was trying to get SQL Reporting
Services to behave in a way that's scalable not just for itself, but for the
entire farm design. When SQL BI folks would ask for SSRS integration, it was a
pain since it felt like they hand't really done their SharePoint homework. SSRS
is now a full on Service Application. This means flexibility, this means it will
be to administer with central admin being the only place for SharePoint
configuration, and management is simply working with the SSRS service app
databases. Much easier to manage disaster recovery for SSRS and the entire farm
that supports it. Troubleshooting will be much easier as well, as an example
SSRS logs to the ULS giving you the same correlation experience that SharePoint
2010 provides.
2. Disaster Recovery and Resiliency
Improvements
Always On - this was the big one. At the SharePoint Conference they showed
an automatic failover of a 14 TB database in less than one minute. There's a ton
in here. Improvements to combining the best of log shipping and mirroring into
one. Such as automatic failover for groups of databases with automatic or manual
failover or failover an entire instance of SQL. Don't forget the ability to do
failover multi site across subnets with encryption and compression built in and
with multiple secondaries!
3. SQL 2012 and SQL Reporting Services now
supports Claims and WCF communication
This is big for me. We've had to design our farms around BI as the app that
we couldn't do well in our extranet since we were using Claims for all our
extranet SharePoint 2010 farms. What was only an Intranet app or AD only, now
auth gets very interesting…
4. Flexible SharePoint Architecture Integration
Architecture scale out and flexibility and topologies are now vastly c.a
Obviously it's the service application piece that did it, but it's worth it's
own line to say scale out is big.
5. Cloud Scale on Demand!
Speaking of scale out, well how about scale up… scale up to the cloud on
demand with SQL Azure and SQL 2012! The cloud stories don't stop there. Cloud
Services Integration of SQL with SharePoint is a huge unexplored territory and
believe me you'll see a lot of interesting hybrid things going on. The scaling
to the cloud story is where it starts. We now have to always consider cloud
storage when architecting our farms.
6. Cross Farm Reporting
Not only does SQL Reporting Services provide good stuff for your BI team,
but the fact that reporting in ShareSharePoint cross farm reporting iRepon
SharePoint leverages SQL Reporting Services means now you can do Cross Farm
Reporting in SQL Server Reporting Services 2012 with SharePoint 2010.
7. Visually appealing presentation quality
reports, clean UI, and powerful tools
From a data perspective SQL Reporting Services is designed to be high
presentation quality reports and they now look so better. Other enhancements
include managing your data alerts right in SharePoint. PowerPivot (v2) for SQL
2012 data mashups are really cool and they've made it really easy to save into
SharePoint. It can really make the BI look really good, and it's fast, super
powerful.Project Crescent has been rebranded as Power View and there will be a
browser based version that will work on iOS & Android devices. Wild stuff! Also
expect a cool story board to PowerPoint functionality to be added before RTM.
SQL 2012 Analysis Services integrates and talks to
SharePoint 2010 Excel Services, Reporting Services, PowerPivot. Project Juneau
has been rebranded as SQL Server Data Tools new experiences for BI users working
with data.
8. Performance
For Reporting Services you'll now see parity between SharePoint and SQL 2012
mode. Reports use to be 2-3x slower. As well it's 30% to 60% faster out of the
gates than SQL 2008 R2 as a whole. Column query processing on the same hardware
can be 10x faster, with reduced IO, less tuning required (Search for more on
this in project Apollo.) The SharePoint Conference Keynote demo showed how
responsive a recordset with millions and millions of records could still be sub
second response times across the list and search queries.
9. Powershell for SQL
You thought Powershell brought a lot to SharePoint? The new commandlets in
SQL 2012 do wonders for automating common tasks and for configuring SQL. It
still may take you a while, but it's the ability to do these tasks in an
automated way that makes it powerful. As an example you can configure the Always
On or even initiate failovers right through powershell… now that's powerful and
useful for flexibility when integrating into your monitoring solutions.
10. Improvements in Security
Now SQL 2012 can sit on Windows Core! That's pretty serious for the
hardening story. Integrated encryption for Always On definitely improves the
default security position that is often overlooked in cross site for disaster
recovery scenarios as well.
With the recent
announcement of SQL 2012 shipping in the first half of 2012 please check out the
Official Press
Release from Microsoft, the
SQL Server 2012
Analysis Services information, the
SQL Server 2012
Reporting Services, the
SQL Server 2012
Enterprise Information Management,
and
SQL 2012 Press Release hosting company