SQL Server 2014 ODBC driver

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 provides users with more mission-critical capabilities and manageability for business-critical applications. SQL Server 2014 also provides new elements of data functionality that you might want to take advantage of.

Hence the reason why the Easysoft ODBC driver supports them.

At Easysoft we are very proud of the fact that we take brand new functionality by database vendors and are the first third-party ODBC provider to support them, enabling our clients to make full use of them within their own organisations.

So as the first ISV to enable Linux and UNIX users take advantage of Microsoft SQL Server 2014 features, what new things do we support?

In-memory tables

SQL Server 2014 now lets organisations move specific tables (and stored procedures) into memory; this minimises I/O overheads and improves the performance of online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. (Microsoft expect some applications to run 20 times faster by taking advantage of this.)

Updateable columnstore indexes

This is another high performance in-memory technology from Microsoft. Originally introduced in SQL Server 2012 to significantly improve performance for data warehousing queries, Microsoft have enhanced the functionality with the introduction of clustered columnstore indexes. This change now makes the underlying table updateable.

In our own tests, we found performance benefits both when querying and updating tables that had clustered columnstore indexes.

New security features

SQL Server 2014 introduces some new security permissions that allow server roles to be set up. Server roles allow database administrators to perform their duties but not see the underlying user data.

AlwaysOn availability groups

Introduced by Microsoft originally in SQL Server 2012, this feature supported a maximum of four secondary replicas. SQL Server 2014 now supports up to eight secondary replicas.

This feature provides high availability and disaster recovery for multiple SQL Server databases without the need for a shared storage SAN.

For more information on the changes view our What's New section or to download and test a SQL Server ODBC driver that supports SQL Server 2014, visit our product page.