SQL Server 2016 Has Arrived!

It’s been a long wait, well, almost precisely the same two years wait that the last version took to release, but with all the latest and greatest features available in SQL 2016, it has been a very exciting wait.

SQL Server 2016 Release

It might seem weird for a DBA to champion BI (Business Intelligence) features; however, they are just too exciting to ignore, so let’s start with those.

You may have heard of DataZen, a company Microsoft bought in April 2015. Using their dashboard server, they create platform-independent BI dashboards; everything would be rendered in HTML 5.

It was and is a fantastic product; Microsoft has only integrated it with SQL 2016 as mobile reports give businesses two ways to view and consume messages, the other being the standard paginated reports.

So what other features appear as SQL Server 2016 comments? Built-in support for R, but what is R?

What is R?

R is a programming language used for statistical reporting bit of a mouthful and not something I have much experience with.

However, the noise about R has been getting louder and louder over the last few years, especially with the growth of Big Dat, and SQL 2016 is undoubtedly a platform that is all about data.

Benefits of SQL Server 2016

I feel the need for speed, and SQL 2016 comes with severe speed increases.

Would you be interested if I told you that you could gain up to a 34x increase in query performance on your current hardware?

If your reports or applications are running slowly, this could be a reason to test your existing apps, at least to see if you can get a decent performance increase.

I prefer to dig into the code if there are any issues with application performance; however, up to 34x improvement for a migration to the latest version could save you time searching through code, although you will still need to take some time to do thorough testing before migration.

Conclusion

I think someone has been peeking at my Christmas list.

I love encryption, and so should you, and now Microsoft has finally given us encryption to get excited about.

The technology protects your data at rest and in transit with zero database performance impact.

It might be time to consider whether I should upgrade to SQL 2016. I will write another post on precisely this topic very shortly.