This exciting new release will include improvements that are interesting to developers, DBA’s and business intelligence pros alike, including:

• New developer improvements including a new unified Visual Studio IDE code named “Juneau”, Transact-SQL programmability improvements and more!
• New “AlwaysOn” capabilities make it easier to deploy and manage high availability and disaster recovery across both shared and non-shared storage, and supports great new functionality like multi-site failover (a.k.a. geo-clusters).
• Core storage engine improvements make it easier to manage all of your data like support for column-store indexing, better support for BLOB and document storage, and statistical semantic search.
• New browser-based reporting tool code named “Crescent” will empower end-users to explore and visualize the data they care about the most with lightning-fast speed and eye popping visualizations.

There are many more improvements that will be revealed as we approach launch.

How to Get Started

We are actively seeking professional developers who are interested in developing real solutions that exploit improvements in SQL Server Code Name “Denali” to participate in the Metro Early Adoption Program.

1. You can self-nominate. You will need a Windows Live ID.
2. You will be asked to provide some details about your company and your early adoption project.

We review each nomination that comes in and approve the solutions we think will have the best chance of showcasing SQL Server Denali improvements during the launch wave.

Here are some of the benefits offered to program participants:

• Access to regularly scheduled confidential online meetings with members of the SQL Server evangelism, marketing and engineering teams.
• Access to DeepDive developer labs to do focused work on specific improvements with the help of the SQL Server engineering team.
• Access to beta support.
• Access to high-quality instructor-led training events.
• Access to a dedicated virtual Sandbox environment with a pre-installed, pre-configured fully functional environment to learn and test improvements.

We plan to offer many more benefits to Metro participants as the program progresses. Check out this Channel 9 video for more information!

For More Information please visit Roger Doherty’s SQL Server Evangelism Blog