Short Review on Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1

Good afternoon everyone I hope you all had a great weekend!

So, carrying on from where I left off on Friday last week... I installed SQL Server 2014 on my home machine and seized the opportunity to investigate the software. Note that this is only a preview version, so really I am just going to give a general overview of how easy it was to install on my machine, what it was like to create/run simple queries in comparison to the performance in SQL 2012 and the overall experience.

Download and Installation

Downloading the installation package took just over 10 minutes, which is fairly reasonable considering the size of the download (around 3GB zipped). This was using a wireless Internet connection with speeds of up to 40Mbps. But please note that slower Internet connections will mean that the file will take longer to download.

As for the installation process, it was pretty much exactly the same as installing any other version of SQL Server. Steps and guides were there to help you configure the SQL Server instance correct for your machine. I must say though, for a junior, it can be quite difficult to install so make sure you read the help guide first. It took around 50 minutes to install in total from executing the package file (and that involved installing everything in the package).

Total Set Up Time: 1 hour 

Speed

I was experimenting last night and I did notice a difference in the speeds of even running my short queries. Unfortunately, I only had time to look at this for an hour or two, however I ran queries to:

• Set up a new database.
• Create 5 tables in 1 script with up to 10 columns in each. 
• Inserted data into my tables (1 at a time). 
• Updated data. 
• Deleted an entire table with data contents. 

Hardly ground breaking stuff I know and these queries shouldn't take long to run on SQL 2012 anyway, however they were still remarkably quicker. This proves that the real-time database updates can be a This may not matter so much for smaller queries, however larger queries really will benefit.

Visually

Visually, SQL 2012 and SQL 2014 are pretty much identical! This is a good thing as I know where to find all of my tools, the new Visual Studio really confused me with the new commenting icon! A screen grab of the new version is shown below:

Overall

Overall, I am really impressed with the new version despite it only being a preview. I feel that the new version could potentially be ground breaking in terms of speed, as real-time data updates can be performed with the smaller queries that I used.

Personally, I feel that the new functionality could prove to be a winner for Microsoft. Watch this space!

As A Final Word...

Thanks everyone for reading today's blog post! If you have any questions/comments/feedback, please leave them in the comments section below and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Alternatively, please like my SQL Genius Facebook Page and leave a message on there. :)