So I have a hardware implementation meeting on Monday for deciding how we are going to setup the production servers for my company's SharePoint 2013 installation.
At the moment we are thinking of setting up a physical MS SQL 2014 server a HP Blade (I asked the project manager what the specs of the server where and he said its a big server with 256Gig Ram).
But we might end up using MS SQL 2012 R2 because our current backup software doesn't integrate with MS SQL 2014. So if we where to use MS SQL 2014 it would be harder for them to do transaction log shipping and the Data Management Team would only really guaranty the file backup of the hourly full backups of the database.
I would prefer MS SQL 2014 because it has some new features to allow running individual tables directly in ram which could improve performance.
The company is looking at upgrading or changing the backup solution they use so that we would eventualy be able to do point in time backups.
And my view on the database backups is that if we ever got to the point that we had to restore SharePoint from a database backup then we have a very serious issue and most of the time we will be using the versioning features in SharePoint to recover information any way.
Do you have any suggestions on what would be better?
MS SQL 2014 with hourly Full backups and running tables in RAM to improve performance.
OR
MS SQL 2012 with Point in time backups?