Link for downloading CTP 3 of Denali: http://www.microsoft.com/denali

The long awaited wait for CTP3 is over. You can now get access to the upcoming release of SQL Server code named Denali.

CTP3 highlights: This preview is packed with additional functionality and core capabilities including:

 

  • Greater availability. Deliver the required 9s and data protection you need with AlwaysOn, a flexible, integrated high availability and disaster recovery solution that helps businesses increase availability for mission critical applications, lower TCO and simplify setup, configuration and monitoring.
  • Blazing-fast performance. Get unprecedented performance gains with Project “Apollo,” a new column store index that offers 10-100x star join or similar query performance improvements available for the first customer preview.
  • Breakthrough insight. Unlock new insights with rapid data exploration across your organization with Project “Crescent,” available to customers for the first time. Get your hands on the data exploration and visualization tool that everyone is talking about and enables end users to explore data at the speed of thought.
  • Credible, consistent data. Provide a consistent view across heterogeneous data sources with the BI Semantic Model (BISM) a single model for Business Intelligence applications, from reporting and analysis to dashboards and scorecards
  • Productive development experience. Optimize IT and developer productivity across server and cloud with Data-tier Application Component (DAC) parity with SQL Azure and SQL Server Developer Tools code name “Juneau” for a unified and modern development experience across database, BI, and cloud functions
  • Comprehensive upgrade and migration tools. Upgrade Advisor and Distributed Replay provide thorough analysis and testing of current SQL Server applications before upgrading so DBAs know what to expect.  SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) can automate migrations of non-SQL Server databases to SQL Server Code Name “Denali”; learn more at the SSMA team blog

If you are in Australia and are interested in running SQL Server Denali in production, please contact me via this blog and we can look at possible ways of making this happen.

Happy SQLing guys.