Editor's Note, Oct. 22, 2012 - The release was updated after publication to correct the reported number of devices showcased at the event.

SHANGHAI — Oct. 22, 2012 — Microsoft Corp. kicked off global Windows 8 launch celebrations today in China. In the first of a series of celebrations around the world, Microsoft customers and partners joined top company executives at a gathering at Shanghai’s 1933 Grand Theatre to give consumers and commercial customers a sneak peek at new hardware and apps in advance of the Windows 8 worldwide general availability on Oct. 26. Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live Division at Microsoft, and Ralph Haupter, corporate vice president of Microsoft and CEO of Microsoft Greater China Region, attended the celebration.

“Microsoft has a more than 20-year history in the Greater China Region, and we are excited to start our Windows 8 launch series in Shanghai, China, the largest PC market in the world,” Haupter said. He reaffirmed the importance that Microsoft is giving to China and complimented the commitment of our hardware and developers in preparing for Windows 8 over the last couple of months. “Windows 8 ushers in a new era with amazing experiences for Chinese consumers and commercial customers and creates new opportunities for Microsoft partners,” he said.

Windows 8 I s Windows Reimagined

Windows 8 offers a beautiful, new user interface and a wide range of apps with the grand opening of the Windows Store on Oct. 26. Today on display were 52 new devices, designed and optimized for Windows 8 by 15 Microsoft OEM partners. All these devices and more, pre-installed with Windows 8, will be available in China starting Oct. 26.

Microsoft also showed Microsoft Surface with Windows RT, in China, following the announcement of its availability in China on Oct. 16.

Microsoft Surface with Windows RT will be available in China at the Suning stores or http://www.suning.com and the recently launched Microsoft Online Store, www.MicrosoftStore.com.cn.

The new Microsoft Online Store will provide an easy access for a broad range of Microsoft products to Chinese consumers.

Windows 8 also provides opportunities for Chinese developers. They have contributed to the Windows Store with a broad range of apps making China No. 2 market worldwide for all apps available at launch, Haupter pointed out. At today’s event, people are excited to interact with Windows 8 apps and games on Windows 8 devices, including AutoNavi Map, BanBao, China Telecom e Surfacing, Ctrip, PPTV, Renren, QQ, QQ Games, QQ Finance, Sina Weibo, Weather China and Youdao Dictionary. These apps fully displayed the power of the new Windows 8 technology and talent in China.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

Great news! We are excited to announce Aqua Data Studio 12.0, the latest version of our award-winning PostgreSQL database tool. We listened to your feedback and made it our mission to optimize your user experience in order to achieve massive speed gains for Big Data, plenty of GUI enhancements, and an overall more responsive application. We've even updated most of our underlying framework components to bring you better reliability and scalability. It's the best version of Aqua Data Studio ever.

What would a new release be without significant new features? Version 12 now includes FluidShell, an interactive shell combining the best of PostgreSQL command line + Unix shell, which will greatly assist you in automating all your database interactions.

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We've scoured our code to look for ways to improve Aqua Data Studio response times dramatically when dealing with very large data sets. You're going to love the results. We've sped up large script execution by 4x, query results by 10x, table data editor 380x and resultset compare by 850x. We've also made some core enhancements that make the app feel much snappier. Learn more

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Connection Pooling allows you to share connections across multiple query windows. Instead of creating a new connection for every query window, Aqua Data Studio will acquire a connection from the pool at the time of query execution and automatically allocate and de-allocate connections as necessary. Learn more

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When exporting to Excel, pivot grids are no longer limited to 65,000 rows. Plus, your customized chart color properties in Aqua Data Studio are now preserved in Excel. Learn more

The All-new FluidShell

Automate your database interactions

FluidShell is an interactive shell that combines the power of the SQL command line with the versatility of a Unix shell. Use the shell to connect to databases, execute queries, change history buffer and more. Then, take the output of your SQL statements and run them through powerful Unix functionality such as grep, pipelining, input/output re-direction and variable substitution to extract and transform your data any way you choose. Plus, we've exposed many of Aqua Data Studio's native UI features to FluidShell, so you can invoke import/export operations, schema compares, and more—directly from the command line. Learn more

More Powerful UI

A brand new visual editing style

Our new tab based schema viewer and editor eliminates the modal dialogs to make multitasking a breeze. Now you can view and edit several different schemas simultaneously across different databases. Learn more

A more feature rich editor

We've enhanced the usability of our editor by offering line wrapping, block selection copy and improved support for abbreviations. It's the best editor we've ever built. Learn more

Every setting at your fingertips

Aqua Data Studio offers hundreds of configurable options to customize the product to suit your needs. A new intelligent search box in the Options window now lets you quickly find any setting—instantly. Learn more

Latest Database Upgrades

Latest Database Drivers

We've upgraded to the latest JDBC drivers for PostgreSQL, PG - Version 9.1-902 in order to provide peak performance you'll really notice.

Free Download & Evaluation

Aqua Data Studio 12.0 comes with more than 80 new features that build on what is already the best IDE for all your relational database needs. It's absolutely free to try. Download now.

You can run both your existing version and an evaluation version of 12.0 simultaneously. All of your registered servers and customizations will be automatically recognized by both.

Learn more about Aqua Data Studio features:

Version 12.0 New Features

All Aqua Data Studio Features

Contact Us

For licensing questions, subscription renewals or upgrading to version 12.0, please contact us at license@aquafold.com. For technical support, you may use our discussion forums, issue tracking system or contact us directly at architect@aquafold.com.

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