REDMOND, Wash. — March 6, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. today announced that the latest version of the world’s most widely deployed data platform, Microsoft SQL Server 2012, has released to manufacturing.

Microsoft recently updated SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) with support for Visual Studio 2012, improved LocalDB functionality and new SSDT Power Tools. SSDT, if you're unfamiliar with it, is a ...

Full disclosure: I am a co-author of an upcoming book on SQL Server 2012, and I do a lot of work with Microsoft. Why would a new version of SQL Server be a big deal for this blog? As a mainstream ...

Microsoft has introduced SQL Server 2012 to the world and it's time for IT professionals to start to come to speed on what's new. Microsoft has introduced SQL Server 2012 to the world and it's time ...

Microsoft released SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 2 this week. The SP2 release goes by the "RTM" (release to manufacturing) nomenclature, according to Microsoft's announcement. That's an old-fashioned ...

First introduced in SQL Server 2012, columnstore indexes can give you major performance gains -- provided you have the right workloads. Here's how columnstore indexes work and what types of data work ...

Use custom-built .NET Framework 4.0 classes to connect an ASP.NET Web application to a SQL Server 2012 database. In my recent article, I showed how to connect .NET 4.0 C# and Visual Basic applications ...