Get Your Hands on SQL Server 2012 CTP3 in Five Minutes
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I really hate waiting for software to download. It’s a first world problem and I’m an impatient guy. Thankfully, you don’t have to wait through the hour long download of a SQL Server 2012 CTP3 ISO, Windows installation, and SQL Server installation and configuration. You can now just fire up a browser, connect to AWS, and fire up a SQL Server 2012 CTP3 instance.
Microsoft and Amazon have, in their own words, “collaborated to allow customers to easily deploy and run SQL Server Code Named “Denali” on Amazon Web Services in 5 minutes with no additional Microsoft software licensing costs” (barring the cost of Windows). It’s available right now, with no SQL Server licensing costs, and little to no set up overhead. Earlier this week I convinced Brent to set up a SQL Server 2012 instance for testing and he was cursing my cunning plan within 5 minutes.
Sometimes, new AMIs may not make it into every Amazon region, which means you might not get it close to your customers, close to your current location, or on the hardware that you want. In this case the SQL Server 2012 CTP3 AMI is present in all of the current Amazon regions. This means that you can spin up SQL Server 2012 on anything as small as a Micro instance (1.7GB of memory, 1 core, shared gigabit ethernet) or as large as a cc1.4xl (2 x Intel Xeon X5570, 22GB of RAM, and 10 gigabit ethernet). Developers, DBAs, and ISVs take note: this means you can start testing your applications now before SQL Server 2012 is released. There’s no reason to delay your upgrade planning.
Read the press release, get the AMI, have fun.















































The good news is that your database server doesn’t need to be configured for anything in order to use this storage. In our data warehouse example, we could use several of these RevoDrive Hybrids to store our sales table, which has hundreds of millions of rows of history. It documents our company’s history going back for the last ten years, and our executives have told us we’re not allowed to archive any data. They want to be able to run reports to compare this Christmas season’s sales against the last ten Christmases.





















