Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Standard Retail Box

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 delivers enhanced security features over SQL Server 2012. It provides a secure and customisable security architecture, full event handling, flexible and secure storage with transparent data encryption, simple and consolidated enterprise encryption, and key management. SQL Server 2014 focuses on four key areas to meet the database needs of today and tomorrow:

Scale and Performance

SQL Server 2014 enables companies to build a database solution with the performance and scalability capabilities that are necessary for today's applications.

High Availability:

SQL Server 2014 provides a database application with Always-On Technologies, while minimising the management and performance overhead of your high-availability solution.

Security

SQL Server 2014 delivers an enhanced secure data platform by encrypting your valuable data, auditing changes to your data and metadata, incorporating external cryptographic keys, and encrypting and signing data in backup files.

Manageability

SQL Server 2014 enables companies to reduce the time and cost of managing their data infrastructure by providing innovative and automated policy-based administration and improved tools for performance monitoring, troubleshooting and tuning.

MS-SQL Server Express Edition

SQL Server Express is a free edition of SQL Server ideal for developing and powering desktop, web and small server applications. Download SQL Server 2014 R2 Express or try SQL Server Code Name “Denali” CTP3, which includes SQL Server Express LocalDB, a new lightweight deployment option for Express.

Item specifics

Product Description

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Developer lets developers build almost any kind of database application on top of SQL Server. It's licensed for use as a development and test system, not as a production server, and is an ideal choice for people who build and test database applications.

SQL Server 2014 enables customers to build mission-critical applications and Big Data solutions using high-performance, in-memory technology across OLTP, data warehousing, business intelligence and analytics workloads without having to buy expensive add-ons or high-end appliances. SQL Server 2014 uses a common set of tools to deploy and manage databases both on-premises and in the cloud, which makes it easier for customers to take advantage of the cloud with existing skills.

As the foundation of Microsoft’s comprehensive data platform, SQL Server delivers breakthrough performance for mission-critical applications, using in-memory technologies, faster insights from any data to any user in familiar tools like Excel, and a resilient platform for building, deploying, and managing solutions that span on-premises and cloud.

Developer Edition features:

Accelerate performance for transaction processing, data warehousing, and Business Intelligence with In-Memory technologies built-in.

Get easy access to data big and small, relational or non-relational, with a comprehensive Business Intelligence solution that spans on-premises and offers cloud connection points.

Take advantage of tools and capabilities that unlock new hybrid scenarios like simplified database backup and disaster recovery to the cloud.

Benefits

SQL Server 2014 makes it easier and more cost effective to build high-performance, mission-critical applications, enterprise ready Big Data assets, and BI solutions that help employees make better decisions, faster. These solutions have the flexibility of being deployed on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid environment, and can be managed through a common and familiar tool set.

Mission-critical performance

SQL Server 2014 accelerates reliable, mission critical applications with a new in-memory OLTP engine that can deliver on average 10x, and up to 30x transactional performance gains. For Data Warehousing, the new updatable in-memory columnstore can query 100x faster than legacy solutions. SQL Server also delivers peace of mind as the most secure database five years in a row. (National Institute of Standards and Technology Comprehensive Vulnerability Database 4/17/2013, Market share from IDC 2013)

Faster insights on any data

Get to insights faster with a complete BI platform that speeds up how you access, analyze, clean and shape both internal and external data. With SQL Server 2014 and Power BI for Office 365, it is easy to connect every user in an organization to the right data they need to make better decisions, faster.

Platform for hybrid cloud

SQL Server 2014 was designed to work in a hybrid environment that spans on-premises and the cloud and has new tools that make it even easier to build back-up and disaster recovery solutions with Microsoft Azure. These tools provide an easy on-ramp to the cloud for on-premises SQL Server databases, enabling customers to use their existing skills to take advantage of Microsoft’s global datacentres.

Capabilities

Breakthrough, in-memory performance

With SQL Server 2014, new in-memory capabilities for transaction processing and enhancements for data warehousing complement our existing technologies for data warehousing and analytics. Scale and transform your business with, on average, a 10x performance gain for transaction processing while still using existing hardware, and a greater-than 100x performance gain for data warehousing.

Proven, predictable performance

SQL Server consistently leads in TPC-E, TPC-H and real-world application performance benchmarks. SQL Server is SAP-certified to run some of the most demanding workloads. Get more predictable performance of virtualized SQL Server instances with IO governance in Resource Governor.

High availability and disaster recovery

Gain greater uptime, faster failover, improved manageability, and better use of hardware resources through AlwaysOn, a unified solution for high availability. In SQL Server 2014, there are additional active secondaries, new online operations and the ability to quickly setup a secondary in Microsoft Azure.

Enterprise scalability across compute, networking, and storage

With Windows Server, physical processing now scales up to 640 logical processors, and virtual machines scale up to 64 logical processors. SQL Server 2014 uses this scale, storage spaces and network virtualization to maximize overall infrastructure utilization. It can also run on Windows Server Core to lower the surface area of attack.

Security and compliance

Help secure data with transparent data encryption, robust auditing, extensible key management and encrypted backups. It is even easier to manage permissions for data access to support separation of duties across various users.

Consistent data platform on-premises to cloud

Leverage existing skills and familiar tools across Microsoft’s data platform with SQL Server in a Microsoft Azure virtual machine when migrating existing on-premises apps into the cloud, and Microsoft Azure SQL Database for new modern applications that fully utilize the scale of the cloud.

Corporate business intelligence

Scale your BI models, enrich and help secure your data, and ensure quality and accuracy with a complete BI solution. Build comprehensive, enterprise-scale analytic solutions with Analysis Services and simplify BI model deployment with the BI Semantic Model.

Faster insights for all users in familiar tools like Excel and data access via mobile devices

Accelerate time-to-insight, on-premises and in the cloud with SQL 2014 and Power BI for Office 365. Get richer visualizations using Power Map and Power View. Search, access, and shape internal, external, structured, and unstructured data with Power Query. Access insights from anywhere using Power BI for Office 365.

Scalable data warehousing

Scale to petabytes for relational data warehousing and integrate with non-relational sources like Hadoop. Support your smallest to your largest data storage needs while handling queries up to 100x faster than your legacy data platform through massive parallel processing and in-memory technologies with SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse.

Data quality and integration services

Integration services includes rich support for extract, transact and load (ETL) tasks, and the ability to run and manage as a separate SQL Server instance. Improve data quality by using organizational knowledge and third-party data providers to cleanse data through Data Quality Services.

Easy-to-use management tools

SQL Server Management Studio helps you centrally manage your database infrastructure both on-premises and in the cloud. Added support for Windows PowerShell 2.0 automates management tasks and enhancements to Sys Prep let you more efficiently create virtual machines. Simplify application testing on a single database using Distributed Replay.

Robust development tools

SQL Server Data Tools integrate into Visual Studio and are available for download to build next-generation web, enterprise, business intelligence and mobile applications across on-premises and cloud. Customers can use industry standard APIs (ADO.NET, ODBC, JDBC, PDO, and ADO) across varied platforms including .NET, C/C++, Java, Linux, and PHP.