Frst understanding of SQL Server 2014

SQL Server 2014 is designed to address the challenges that face modern businesses by delivering a fast, reliable data platform that enables them to maximize the value that they get from their data. While this course is not intended as marketing collateral for the product, it is worth spending some

time examining the key customer goals that SQL Server is designed to address in order to provide

some context for the product capabilities you will be learning about in this course.

SQL Server 2014 and related Microsoft data platform technologies are designed to provide the

following key capabilities.

Enterprise Database Platform

With organizations increasingly operating in a global marketplace, there is an increasing reliance on

access to data at any time, and from anywhere. To support the typical data access requirements of today’s organizations, a data platform must support enterprise scalability and performance with extremely high levels of availability, and enable fast, reliable data recovery in the event of failure.

Business Intelligence

A major trend in BI in the last few years has been the increasingly self-service nature of business

intelligence and reporting solutions. Self-service BI enables users to have much faster and easier access to data, without the need to seek assistance from professional data analysts, report developers, and so on.

Cloud Infrastructure Solutions

Over the past few years, the advent of cloud technologies has had a significant effect on the design and implementation of IT infrastructure and application solutions. Cloud-based approaches to data

infrastructure bring many benefits, including reduced infrastructure management, on-demand scalability, and better control of financial costs.