Exploring and Managing SQL Server 2012 Database Engine Improvements

This content in this unit provides an overview of improvements to the SQL Server 2012 database engine including indexing, partitioning, security and auditing.

• Working With SQL Server Columnstore Indexes (RTM Update)

  In this lab, you will learn to use SQL Server 2012 new columnstore index feature to accelerate the performance of typical data warehouse queries involving a centralized fact table and associated dimension tables.

• Presentation: Introducing SQL Server 2012 Columnstore Indexes

  Columnstore indexes provide an easy way to significantly improve data warehouse and decision support query performance against very large data sets.

• Demo: Accelerating Data Warehouse Queries with SQL Server 2012 Columnstore Indexes

  This demonstration shows how to implement Columnstore Indexes, establish the performance impact for a standard data warehouse query and lastly show how to modify rows for a table with a Columnstore Index using partitioning.

• Presentation: Introducing SQL Server 2012 Table Partitioning Improvements

  SQL Server 2012 offers several important improvements that related to table partitioning, including more partitions per table, improved online operations, better index build performance and new wizards.

• Demo: SQL Server 2012 Table Partitioning Enhancements

  This demo shows how to use the enhanced Partition Wizard to switch out and switch in a partition. We’ll demonstrate this enhanced UI against a table with more than 1,000 partitions (by example demonstrating this new capability as well).

• Presentation: Introducing SQL Server 2012 Security and Auditing Improvements

  In this presentation we'll cover SQL Server 2012 improvements that impact security and auditing, including new support for default schema for groups, user-defined server roles and various auditing improvements.

• Demo: Customizing Server Roles in SQL Server 2012

  This demo shows how to create a user-defined server role in Transact-SQL. In five minutes we'll walk through how to create a role, add members, remove a member, grant permissions to the role and change the role name. Along the way we'll validate the changes we've made using security catalog views.

• Presentation: Introducing SQL Server 2012 Extended Events Enhancements

  SQL Server extended events enable rich diagnostic troubleshooting capabilities, and SQL Server 2012 provides new tools and APIs for extended events.

• Demo: SQL Server 2012 Extended Events Enhancements

  This demonstration shows how to use the new Extended Events wizards and interfaces in SQL Server Management Studio.

• Presentation: Introducing the SQL Server 2012 Distributed Replay Utility

  SQL Server 2012 introduces an important new utility called Distributed Replay that will change the way you benchmark and test your database workloads.

• Demo: SQL Server 2012 Distributed Replay

  This demonstration shows how to launch the Distributed Replay controller and client, pre-process a trace file workload, launch the workload and validate that it is running through SQL Server Profiler.