The book I read to research this post was Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Technical Overview by Ross Mistry et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is quite long and is a free download on kindle so represents good value. It isn’t a how to guide and hasn’t enough space to cover all the features of SQL Server but is aimed at Database Administrators who want the general picture prior to upgrading. The new version integrates with the cloud product Windows Azure so it is like a hybrid cloud product. In addition you can save data to a URL if you use a 3rd party cloud site or company website. There are several major versions which are Enterprise, Business Intelligence & Standard. In addition there are some cheaper niche products Web, Developer & Express version with Express being a free entry level product. With the Enterprise version you can have up to 2048 processors on the server and up to 8,000 virtual account users. It is very much for large companies. The Express version lets you have tables up to 10 GB so is very much aimed at small businesses. It integrates with Excel which if you get one of the current Professional Plus or standalone versions has features like powerpivot tables for doing statistical analysis on data. They did start to move in this direction with the 2010 version and the 2013 & 365 versions contain a lot of additional features. This will normally have Windows 2012 R2 as the operating system but will also work to a lesser extent with Windows 8. Windows 2012 has many cloud computing features many specific to certain providers. In fact is the main upgrade in that program. I’m not hugely knowledgeable about SQL Server but found this book very interesting and with it being free you can’t go wrong. Microsoft Press are doing free entry level books on the various current Microsoft products for free to help sell them with more specialized publications obviously for sale that you have to buy.
scratbagroberts 