Microsoft Dynamics CRM R8 SQL Server 2012

Mark Smith, 07 February 2012

Now when it comes to Microsoft SQL I am no expert, however I have seen presentations on the soon to be released SQL Server 2012 and my staff keep up to speed on the technical side of things. It takes performance, scalability and business intelligence to a whole new level.  What I have seen done in SQL Server with Power View (code name Crescent) is nothing short of mind blowing on the reporting front.  So what does that mean in business terms?  It will allow business managers and owners to understand the information they are collecting and use it in new ways to grow their organizations.  So let’s get down to business and see what new with SQL Server 2012 and how that will impact on Dynamics CRM.

So here is the data straight from Microsoft:

• There are many new capabilities that Microsoft customers can take advantage of including:
• Significantly boost query performance, by up to ~100x for star join and similar queries, using the new ColumnStore Index.
• Support blazing fast queries with dramatic improvements to Full-Text Search that offer serious performance and scale advances.
• Accelerate the performance of I/O intensive workloads by cutting growing volumes of data ~50-60% with compression capabilities.
• Gain consistent performance for concurrent and mixed workloads by defining resource usage across different applications with Resource Governor.
• Analyse query execution plans, capture database activity, optimize indexes and structures, and help ensure consistent query performance with familiar, easy-to-use management tools.
• Enable new scenarios with SQL Azure Data Sync, a cloud service that provides bi-directional data synchronization between databases across datacentre and cloud.
• Gain high scale with support for up to 256 cores – enabling high-performance for very large workloads or consolidation scenarios.
• Read more about it here SQL Server 2012
  

So that is the technical data done and dusted and the good news SQL Server 2012 is already running in all Microsoft datacentres for CRM.

So here are some additional things we are going to get with this release:

• Interactive data exploration
• Visualization
• Presentation
• Intuitive ad-hoc reporting for business users, data analysts, business decision makers and information workers
• Power View allows you to connect Microsoft Excel PowerPivot or SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

Microsoft will also be releasing pre-defined PowerPivot models and Power View Report templates that can be built upon and extended. The following four are to be released in R8.

• Product Sales Analysis
• Customer Care Trends
• Sales Pipeline Analysis
• Customer Demographics Analysis

 Power View

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