SQL Server 2016 public preview coming

Satya Nadella, announced SQL Server 2016, Microsoft’s database and analytics platform.

Features include:

Always Encrypted

Based on technology from Microsoft Research, SQL Server can perform operations on encrypted data and best of all, the encryption key resides with the application in the customers trusted environment. Encryption and decryption of data happens transparently inside the application which minimizes the changes that have to be made to existing applications.

Stretch Database

This unique technology allows you to dynamically stretch your warm and cold transactional data to Microsoft Azure, so your operational data is always at hand, no matter the size, and you benefit from the low cost of using Microsoft Azure.  You can use Always Encrypted with Stretch Database to extend your data in a more secure manner for greater peace of mind.

Real-time Operational Analytics & In-Memory OLTP

For In-Memory OLTP, which customers today are using for up to 30x faster transactions than disk based systems, you will now be able to apply this technology tuned for transactional performance to a significantly greater number of applications as well as benefit from increased concurrency.  With these enhancements, Microsoft also introduces the unique capability to use their in-memory columnstore delivering 100X faster queries with in-memory OLTP for in-memory performance and real-time operational analytics.

Built-in Advanced Analytics, PolyBase and Mobile BI

Microsoft makes advanced analytics more accessible and increase sperformance for your advanced analytic workloads by bringing R (Revolution Analytics) processing closer to the data and building advanced analytic capabilities right into SQL Server.  Additionally, they are building PolyBase into SQL Server, expanding the power to extract value from unstructured and structured data using your existing T-SQL skills. With this wave, you can then gain faster insights through rich visualizations on many devices including mobile applications on Windows, iOS and Android.

Additional capabilities in SQL Server 2016 include:

  • Additional security enhancements for Row-level Security and Dynamic Data Masking to round out our security investments with Always Encrypted.
  • Improvements to AlwaysOn for more robust availability and disaster recovery with multiple synchronous replicas and secondary load balancing.
  • Native JSON support to offer better performance and support for your many types of your data.
  • SQL Server Enterprise Information Management (EIM) tools and Analysis Services get an upgrade in performance, usability and scalability.
  • Faster hybrid backups, high availability and disaster recovery scenarios to backup and restore your on-premises databases to Azure and place your SQL Server AlwaysOn secondaries in Azure.

Visit the SQL Server 2016 preview page to read about the capabilities of SQL Server 2016 and sign-up to be notified once the public preview is available.