This week Microsoft released its next-generation SQL Server database management system, code-named “Denali”, as a community technology preview (CTP3) release. The release comes with numerous enhancements in availability, manageability, programmability, scalability, performance and security to increase the server’s accessibility, scalability, ease of use and to lower operating costs.

The most important features include:

• A new analytical mash-up capability known as Crescent which produces interactive charts with drill-down capabilities, allows ad hoc queries and can display results in a slideshow layout.
• The new AlwaysOn feature, which is designed to enable high availability, allows multiple backups for disaster recovery through failover cluster instances, availability groups and indirect checkpoints.
• Column indexes which allow warehouse queries to be executed 10 times faster.

Click here to visit the SQL Server ‘Denali’ download page.

For more information, see: What’s new: SQL Server “Denali”