Free eBook of the Day: "Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014 - Technical Overview" [Keyword: "Overview"] - Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

Microsoft Press - Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014

We’re pleased to announce our next free ebook – Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2014 – by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner.

Introduction
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 is the next generation of Microsoft’s information platform, with new features that deliver faster performance, expand capabilities in the cloud, and provide powerful business insights. In this book, we explain how SQL Server 2014 incorporates in-memory technology to boost performance in online transactional processing (OLTP) and data-warehouse solutions. We also describe how it eases the transition from on-premises solutions to the cloud with added support for hybrid environments. SQL Server 2014 continues to include components that support analysis, although no major new features for business intelligence were included in this release. However, several advances of note have been made in related technologies such as Microsoft Excel 2013, Power BI for Office 365, HDInsight, and PolyBase, and we describe these advances in this book as well.
Who should read this book?

This book is for anyone who has an interest in SQL Server 2014 and wants to understand its capabilities. Many new improvements have been made to SQL Server 2014, but in a book of this size we cannot cover every improvement in its entirety—or cover every feature that distinguishes SQL Server from other databases or SQL Server 2014 from previous versions. Consequently, we assume that you have some familiarity with SQL Server already. You might be a database administrator (DBA), an application developer, a business intelligence solution architect, a power user, or a technical decision maker. Regardless of your role, we hope that you can use this book to discover the features in SQL Server 2014 that are most beneficial to you. [GD: Post Leached in Full]

You heard that SQL Server 2014 became available for download last week, April 1st (no fooling), right? And now that it's available, you're ready to really invest a little time and learn more about it? This free ebook is for you then...

Get it from the Microsoft Virtual Academy eBook Shelf

I'm cheating a little, but here are the direct download links...

Download the PDF (8.08 MB)
Download the EPUB file (8.22 MB)
Download the Mobi for Kindle file (12.3 MB)

Here are some snaps from the PDF;

Who should read this book?
This book is for anyone who has an interest in SQL Server 2014 and wants to understand its capabilities. Many new improvements have been made to SQL Server 2014, but in a book of this size we cannot cover every improvement in its entirety—or cover every feature that distinguishes SQL Server from other databases or SQL Server 2014 from previous versions. Consequently, we assume that you have some familiarity with SQL Server already. You might be a database administrator (DBA), an application developer, a business intelligence solution architect, a power user, or a technical decision maker. Regardless of your role, we hope that you can use this book to discover the features in SQL Server 2014 that are most beneficial to you.

Assumptions
We assume that you have at least a minimal understanding of SQL Server from both a database administrator’s perspective and a business-intelligence perspective, including a general understanding of Microsoft Excel, which is often used with SQL Server. In addition, having a basic understanding of Windows Azure is helpful for getting the most from the topics associated with private, public, and hybrid-cloud solutions.

Who should not read this book
As mentioned earlier, the purpose of this book is to provide readers with a high-level preview of the capabilities and features of SQL Server 2014. This book is not intended to be a step-by-step, comprehensive guide.