Tag Archives: SQL Server

Great FREE SQL Server 2012 webinars for UK partners in Nov to March

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Microsoft UK has pulled together a great set of on-demand and live webinars to help you get to grips with SQL Server 2012. Enjoy!

NB: You will need to be a registered partner on the Microsoft Partner Network to take advantage of these.

Upcoming Live Technical Webinars:

Monthly Webinar series on SQL Server 2012 delivered by the UK team    Register

  • 10/11/2011  SQL Server 2012 Overview & Licensing (sorry – we all missed that one!)
  • 24/11/2011 SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn
  • 08/12/2011 SQL Server 2012 Power View & PowerPivot v2
  • 22/12/2011 SQL Server 2012 Column Store Index and Database Replay
  • 05/01/2011 SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM)
  • 19/01/2012 SQL Server 2012 on Windows Server Core Edition
  • 02/02/2012 SQL Server 2012 Security enhancements
  • 16/02/2012 SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services & Master Data Services enhancements
  • 01/03/2012 SQL Server 2012 SSRS SharePoint integration & Alerting – Plus a series wrap up

On-Demand Technical:

For BI Consultants:

Technical Overview of New Features: SQL Server Code Name Denali

SQL Server: Data Discovery and Managed Self-Service BI

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Credible, Consistent Data

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Complete Data Warehousing Solution

For Database Administrators & Developers:

Technical Overview of New Features: SQL Server Code Name Denali

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Required 9s and Data Protection

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Blazing Fast Performance

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Organizational Compliance

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Scale on Demand

For Application Developers:

Technical Overview of New Features: SQL Server Code Name Denali

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Optimized Developer Productivity

SQL Server Code Name Denali: Extend Data Virtually Anywhere

On-Demand Licensing:

Workshops on Licensing:

  • What’s new in SQL Server 2012 and how does it affect you    Dec 13th Register

No OLEDB support in SQL Server post Denali

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The next release of Microsoft SQL Server, codename “Denali”, will be the last release to support OLE DB. OLE DB will be supported for 7 years from launch, the life of Denali support, to allow you a large window of opportunity for changing your applications before the deprecation. This deprecation applies to the Microsoft SQL Server OLE DB provider only. Other OLE DB providers as well as the OLE DB standard will continue to be supported until explicitly announced. Read more over on the sqlnativeclient blog.

A little history:

Today there are many different ways to connect to SQL Server. What you normally require is a consumer (e.g. the ADO.NET Entity Framework) and a provider (e.g. an ADO.NET Data Provider). ADO.NET Data Providers are the most recent manifestation of providers and are the preferred way to connect to SQL Server today if your consumer is running on the Windows platform. The ADO.NET Data Provider model allows “older” providers to be consumed via modern ADO.NET clients – specifically that means ODBC and OLE DB drivers. This feature is very cool although there are now many great native ADO.NET Data Providers.

Now lets briefly recap on ODBC and OLEDB:

  • ODBC emerged around 1992. It replaced the world of DB Library, ESQL for C et al and soon became a “standard”
  • OLEDB appeared 4 years later in 1996 (which happens to be when I joined Microsoft)

OLE DB was created to be the successor to ODBC – expanding the supported data sources/models to include things other than relational databases. Notably OLEDB was tightly tied to a Windows only technology (COM) whilst ODBC was not (Although we did try and take COM cross platform via partners)

ODBC never did get replaced. What actually happened is that ODBC remained the dominant of the two technologies for many scenarios – and became increasingly used on none Windows platforms and has become the de-facto industry standard for native relational data access.

Therefore we find ourselves in a world where:

  • A new Windows client to SQL Server/SQL Azure will most likely use the ADO.NET Data Provider for SQL Server
  • A new none Windows client to SQL Server/SQL Azure will most likely use the ODBC driver for SQL Server

Notice no mention of … OLEDB.

I know many UK ISVs with older applications that do use OLEDB. Please do check out the related links below and remember this is just about the SQL Server OLEDB Provider.

Related Links