Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2014 CTP 1 available to download at TechEd Europe.

You can download SQL Server 2014 CTP1 from here. Additionally, there is in depth documentation of the product in the Product Guide over here.

In this blog post I have in depth discussed what are the salient features which I was looking forward in the new version.

• Always On supports now 8 secondaries instead of 4
• Online Indexing at partition level – this is a good thing as now index rebuilding can be done at a partition level
• Statistics at the partition level – this will be a huge improvement in performance
• In-Memory OLTP works by providing in-application memory storage for the most often used tables in SQL Server.
• Columnstore Index can be updated – I just can’t wait for this feature (Columnstore Index)
• Resource Governor can control IO along with CPU and Memory
• Increase performance by extending SQL Server in-memory buffer pool to SSDs
• Backup to Azure Storage

You can read about the new features of the SQL Server 2014 in the following links:

• What’s New (Database Engine)
• What’s New in Analysis Services and Business Intelligence
• What’s New (Integration Services)
• What’s New (Replication)
• What’s New (Reporting Services)

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)