These organizations are now virtualizing their most critical applications and embracing a “virtualization first” policy. These challenges have been recognized by many organizations in recent years. As application workloads vary greatly, many SQL Server installations are allocated more hardware resources than they need, while others are starved for compute resources. For this reason, many application owners insist on having a SQL Server installation dedicated to an application. Each application has its own set of requirements for the database layer, resulting in multiple versions, patch levels, and maintenance processes. As the number of applications in the enterprise continues to grow, an increasing number of SQL Server installations are brought under lifecycle management. The flexibility at the database layer translates directly into application flexibility, giving end users more useful application features and ultimately improving productivity.Īpplication flexibility often comes at a cost to operations. The flexibility of SQL Server, with its rich application capabilities combined with the low costs of x86 computing, has led to a wide variety of SQL Server installations ranging from large data warehouses with business intelligence and reporting features to small, highly specialized departmental and application databases.

Microsoft SQL Server ® is one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world, with many organizations having dozens or even hundreds of instances deployed in their environments.

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