Chapter 1 – Introduction
“Fall seven times – Stand up eight.”
– Japanese proverb
Introduction to the Family of SQL Server Products
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0
Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0 is a compact database that is embedded inside Nexus and other desktops around the world. It is ideal for also embedding in web applications. SQL Server Compact 4.0 provides developers a common programming model with other SQL Server editions. This is important for developing both native and managed applications. SQL Server Compact provides outstanding flexibility, but in a small footprint.
SQL Server 2014 Express Edition
Microsoft provides this for free! This powerful database engine is perfect for embedded applications or for redistribution with other solutions. Independent software vendors (ISV's) use it to build desktop applications. If you need support for greater than 10 GB databases, SQL Server Express is compatible with other editions of SQL Server.
SQL Server Standard Edition
Microsoft's robust data management and business intelligence database is ideal for departments and small workgroups. It supports common development tools for both on premise and cloud applications. This edition enables effective database management with minimal IT resources and it is compatible with other editions.
Above are the first three offerings from Microsoft on SQL Server.
Introduction to the Family Continued
Microsoft SQL Server Web Edition
Microsoft's Web edition is a low total-cost-of-ownership option to host Web applications that provides scalability, affordability, and manageability capabilities for small to large scale Web initiatives.
SQL Server 2014 Business Intelligence Edition
Microsoft's Business Intelligence edition is for the BI intelligence community and delivers a comprehensive platform. This empowers organizations to build and deploy secure, scalable and manageable BI solutions. It has browser based data exploration and visualization, plus includes powerful integration capabilities.
SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition
Microsoft's SQL Server 2014 Enterprise edition delivers high-end datacenter capabilities with performance that has been enhanced for virtualization, business intelligence and integration capabilities. This enables high service levels for mission-critical workloads and end user access to data insights.
Above are the next three offerings from Microsoft on SQL Server.
Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Azure SQL Data Warehouse
Microsoft's Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehousing appliance built for any volume of relational data and provides integration to Hadoop. Azure SQL Data Warehouse can provide up to 100x performance gains over other SQL Server platforms. This is the MPP platform that provides linear scalability for when data volumes grow and the number of users increases.
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is designed to parallelize and distribute the processing across multiple Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP ) compute nodes. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is only available as part of Microsoft’s Analytics Platform System (APS) appliance.
Azure SQL Data Warehouse is a shared-nothing architecture, which means each processor has its own operating system, memory and set of disks. Nothing is shared! Data is “horizontally partitioned” across nodes. This means that each node has a subset of the rows from each table in the database. Each node is then responsible for processing only the rows on its own disks.
Above is the information about Microsoft's Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which is Microsoft's MPP system for cloud computing and available on the Azure cloud.
Nexus is Now Available on the Microsoft Azure Cloud
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NEXUS QUERY CHAMELEON |
Why the Nexus Chameleon should be your query tool of choice:
1)Queries every major system
2)Provides visualization and automatically writes the SQL
3)Can perform cross-system joins with a few clicks of the mouse
4)Converts table structures and moves the table and data between systems
5)Compares and synchronizes databases
6)Can move an entire database of tables or views between systems
7)Has the "Garden of Analysis" to re-query answer sets inside your PC
8)Provides a dashboard of graphs and charts for answer sets
Download the Nexus for a free trial at www.CoffingDW.com and use Nexus in-house or on the Azure cloud.
Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP)
A Symmetric Multi-Processing system has multiple processors for extra power, but these processors share a single operating system, memory pool and they share access to the disks. This is a great architecture for speed, similar to a restaurant that is quick and organized, but it lacks the ability for unlimited expansion. When there are too many cooks in the kitchen you need an MPP system that scales many SMP systems together as one parallel processing data warehouse.
A Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) system is what Microsoft is known for in their SQL Server suite of products.
Naming of Objects
Object names can include the following characters:
•Letters from a-z, A-Z, and letter characters from other languages.
•Numeric characters 0-9.
•Special characters _, @, $, #.
Object names must also meet the following requirements:
•Object names must not be reserved words.
•Embedded spaces are not allowed in object names.
•Unicode supplementary characters are not allowed in object names.
More facts about objects:
Database, table, and view names must be 1-128 characters long and begin with a letter character. They are case insensitive. Database names are unique per system. Table and view names must be unique per database.
Index, column, and statistics names must be 1-32 characters long and begin with a letter character. They are case insensitive. Index names are unique per database. Column and statistics names must be unique per table.
Above are the key facts you need to understand SQL Server tables.