Interoperability tools that makes life easier when you use SQL Server 2012

Present day data originates from all kinds of devices from hand held devices to mega data centers and it is not always homogeneous even from a single enterprise. The reality is that more often heterogeneous data from disparate systems needs to be consumed whether it is data from enterprise sites or from cloud based data sources. Interoperability tools make life easier to deal with this multifaceted data.

• Connectivity to data is the first thing that you need to take care of and in case you are accessing data on SQL Server 2012 from your LINUX box you need a connector and SQL Server 2012 provides the SQL Server ODBC Driver (v1.0) for LINUX. This release provides ODBC to support 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 and tools such as SQLCMD and BCP. You need to download this here.

• ADO.NET Backward compatibility would be provided by Windows 8 but to have this now and leverage AlwaysON and SQL Server Express LocalDB support you need to apply an update for the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 you pick up from here.

• Connecting to SQL Servers from Java applications was provided by JDBC Drivers. The Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 now provides you with the following:

*Access data on SQL Server and SQL Azure from Java Applications

*Pure Java Implementation of Kerberos Integrated Security

*SQL Server AlwaysOn feature

*Support for SQL Server Parallel Datawarehouse

*Easy access to diagnostic info in extended events log

*Support for UTF-16

*SQL Azure support

Of course you need to download the following here.

Check out my SQL Azure book to find out how Java applications connect to SQL Azure

• A new SQL Server 2012 Native Client (with tasty acronym-Snac) consisting of a single driver (dll) which combines both a SQL Server OLE DB provider (hey! I thought this was being sent to oblivion) and an ODBC driver to connect to SQL Servers that ships with SQL Server 2012. It supports all the great features such as SQL Server Express 2012 LocalDB, AlwaysOn etc. Download this text file which lists all the features that you can have and the links from where you can get them. SQL Server Native Client 2012 is one of the features which you can install.

• PHP is another language that enjoys wide popularity and of course Microsoft does not want to leave out this very important language. For PHP applications to work with SQL Servers you need a helper. The Microsoft PHP Driver (version 3.0) provides this important support and you may want to download it from here.

While support for Java and PHP applications were available in earlier versions including SQL Azure, these new versions will be able to support all the new features of SQL Server 2012 discussed earlier like AlwaysOn, SQL Server Express 2012 LocalDB, etc.

If you want to learn everything about connecting securely to SQL Azure you may want to take a look at my book on SQL Azure. If you want to create front end applications with data on different versions of SQL Servers you may want to take a look at my book on Microsoft Lightswitch.

Of course my books on SSRS and SSIS will provide a strong background when you work with Business Intelligence projects with SQL Servers. BI, Interoperability and Cloud is all the rage in coming years!