SQL Server 2012 first Release Candidate is out

During the autumn time, Microsoft has been busy developing SQL Server further. The next version name has now been announced, and will simply be "SQL Server 2012". That sounds fine, as the previous version was SQL Server 2008 with the "R2" marker for the second release.

Microsoft has also updated the main product pages. If you now take a look at www.microsoft.com/sql, you can see the new version being actively marketed already. Currently, the latest version is RC0, i.e. the first release candidate version. You can download RC0 from MSDN or here. At this point, the version number is 11.0.1750.32.

The interesting thing about the new Standard edition (this is the basic workhorse edition) can now run on up to 16 cores (should be plenty for most SMB customers) and also now support 2-node failover clustering. Previously, this was an Enterprise edition feature only.

Also available is the LocalDB release candidate: "LocalDB is a new version of Express created specifically for developers. It is very easy to install and requires no management, yet it offers the same T-SQL language, programming surface and client-side providers as the regular SQL Server Express." See here for details.