SQL Server News from PASS 2015

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SQL Server News from PASS 2015

Hi!

Last week was PASS Summit in Seattle. Here’s a short summary of announcements:

  • CTP 3 of SQL Server 2016 is now available

  • The roadmap for Microsoft BI visualization tools has been revealed

  • Multiple announcements have been made about other BI components

 Read the details on Chris Webb’s BI blog

SQL Server 2016 Community Technology Preview 3.0

The SQL Server engineering team is pleased to announce the availability of SQL Server 2016 October public preview release CTP 3.0.  This release is a key milestone for SQL Server 2016 with all the key capabilities landing, including R language integration, In-Memory improvements, and more. To learn more about this release, visit the SQL Server 2016 Blog.

Try the exciting features in SQL Server 2016 and the new rapid release model and start evaluating the impact these new innovations can have for your business.

Download SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.0 

Try the preview in a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure

Reporting Roadmap for SQL Server and Power BI

Our goal is simple – we want to put the power of data in the hands of every business and person on the planet. It is our objective to serve over a billion users with the Microsoft business intelligence (BI) platform.

We intend to standardize reporting content types across Microsoft on-premises, cloud and hybrid systems. Our reporting path forward focuses on four report types: paginated reports (SSRS), interactive reports (Power View), Mobile reports (Datazen), Analytical reports (Excel).

More information is available on our Microsoft Business Intelligence blog

SQL Server 2005 End-of-Life

Are you still running SQL Server 2005? Now is the time to upgrade to a modern data platform! After 10 great years, extended support for all versions of SQL Server 2005 is coming to an end in five months, on April 12, 2016.

  • SQL Server 2014 has been benchmarked to be 13 times faster than SQL Server 2005, before the additional performance gains available from in-memory OLTP.

  • AlwaysOn availability groups provide more reliable High Availability.

  • Together with Windows Server 2012 R2 you can scale up across compute, networking and storage.

  • New tools in SQL Server Management Studio provide an easy on-ramp to cloud to help you get more from your data platform investment.

Contact us for more information about upgrading and read more information on our SQL Server blog.