Understanding SQL Server 2014

The business landscape is always changing, and business software solutions, such as database platforms, must evolve to meet the changing demands. Since the release of SQL Server 2008, several trends in the way that businesses use technology, and in particular data management solutions, have emerged. SQL Server 2014 builds on technologies introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012 to help organizations take advantage of new opportunities for data-based business decision making and management and become more successful.

In this lesson, you will learn about the core data workloads that SQL Server 2014 supports, as well as the key data business challenges that the product is designed to address.

Common Data Workloads
Most organizations use database systems to manage business data. While the specific details of how each organization uses its data can vary enormously, there are four common data workloads that the data systems used by modern enterprises must support.

Online Transaction Processing
Online transaction processing (OLTP) systems typically use a relational database to store details of
business transactions and operations, such as sales orders or inventory management records. The data
platform used for this type of workload must support both read and write operations for the data, with potentially huge numbers of transactions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (24x7).

Enterprise Integration Management
Many organizations use multiple OLTP databases and other types of data store, and potentially need to integrate internal data systems with data sources from outside the enterprise. To ensure the integrity of the data stored across diverse sources, and to help business users to access and collate information from multiple systems, the data platform must support an enterprise integration management (EIM) workload