5/10/15

New features in Microsoft SQL Server 2016

Sitting on my train home from Microsoft Ignite 2015 in Chicago, IL, USA after 14 hours of travelling and still three hours to go. I’d like to summarize a few of all new features that we probably will get in vNext, i.e. Microsoft SQL Server 2016. At the time being there isn’t a public CTP, but to the summer we’ll probably get our hands on CTP2 which will be the first public preview and sneak peek.

For the BI folks out there in the world I’m going to say: There are investments done in Analysis Services, Master Data Services and Data Quality Services. Power BI is getting closer to On-Prem, Power Query as a Data Source for Integration Services and this is not all. Over the time forward I will elaborate and share my expressions of all the new goodies.

For the DBAs out there, and the DB Devs too, we’re getting tons of new stuff. Think about having a tool that actually persists queries and execution plans, and help us identify parameters, and easily pinpoint execution plans to explicit queries. And expose this together with graphs and statistics. This coolness is called Query Store.

And think about having a Slowly Changing Dimension type 3 alike feature built in into the OLTP engine, and having this ability transparently added to tables we need to keep track of all versions of rows, and as a time machine jump back and forward in time over the data. This is called Temporal Tables.

Is your table growing out of size and you still need to keep everything forever? Think about letting the table stretch cold data to Azure, still keeping it online, transparently and infinitely. Just having the need to have the hot and warm data in the backups, still being able to restore to any point in time have timely snapshots for your restore process. In 2016 the hybrid experience take another step and gives us the ability to stretch an On-Premise table to Azure offering you potential infinite storage.

This is just some, and more will come… I’ll keep you posted!

Over and out,

Mattias