‘Denali’ CTP3 Release

On Monday, Microsoft announced the third community technology preview (CTP3) release of its next-generation SQL Server database management system, code-named “Denali”.

I am excited to see some of the enhancements that come out with the first release:

AlwaysOn – high availability data recovery

Apollo – column store database technology which likely aims at faster query performance

Crescent – a booster shot for the PowerPivot technology that was part of the 2008 R2 release.  Built entirely on silverlight, it will have a powerful query tool and provide drag and drop ad-hoc reporting functionality.

Juneau – single environment for database, BI and web solutions

Ad-Hoc Query Paging – I’ve wanted to have this functionality for a while now.  OFFSET and FETCH will provide a starting point for your select statement and also provide the number of records to return at a time.

Data Quality Services – Information about data data set that shows data lineage, impact analysis

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To feature some of the enahncements in SSIS, here is an awesome writeup from Jamie Thompson :

Parameterize – “Variables” for projects and packages.  Pretty cool.  The difference between Package Parameters and package-scoped variables?  A child package can inherit the parent parameter… not bad.  The new pane is cool too – I always hated when I couldn’t find the variables tab.

Shared Connection Managers -  Connection Managers can be shared between packages now. Should make up-front configuration a lot easier.

Expression Indicator – A little fx in the corner of a variable letting you know that there is an expression associated with the variable. This would have saved me a lot of time in the past.

Change variable scope – THANK GOODNESS!

Double Click to add – Dragging and dropping gone.

Sort by Name – Sort your packages alphabettically.  Anyone who has developed a project with more than 5 packages will like this one.  Not a game changer though.

Simplified data viewers – Grids only(?), and you can select what you want to see.  What other options were there?

4000 Character Limits Gone – Cool, never needed more than 4000 characters, but knew some people that did.

New expressions – LEFT (just like you would in SQL – no more substringing), TOKEN/TOKENCOUNT (makes data parsing so much easier)

Success/Failure Indicator – Check marks and X’s instead of red and green boxes.  Not sure I like this… My boss knows how hard I am working by the number of green and yellow boxes on my screen.  He can also see my ineptitude by the number of red’s

Multiple row formats – Supports loading of files with multiple row formats.  I wrote about this in my post: Parent-Child records in SSIS.  I guess I’ll have to edit that one.

Script – Creates a script to execute your package from Management Studio.  Cool.

Logging Level – Determine what gets logged.  None, Basic, Performance, Verbose.  My wife would love this function for me.

Data Taps – At any path, capture all the data coming through and output it to a text file to review later.  This is done without having to modify the package.  Kinda neat.  I’d like data tap to be more like double click on a path and get an instant view of the data streaming through.  That’d be cool.

Expression Task – This will assign the result of an expression to a variable. The author is not a huge fan.  It’s kind of silly and there are a number of ways to do this.

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Tags: Denali, Microsoft SQL Server, SSIS