First Public Preview Of SQL Server 2016 Now Available For Download

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SQL Server 2016

Microsoft today announced the release of first public Community Technology Preview (CTP2) for SQL Server 2016. SQL Server 2016 provides breakthrough performance for mission critical applications and deeper insights on your data across on-premises and cloud. Some of the features included in this release are: Always Encrypted – a new capability that protects data at rest and in motion, Stretch Database – new technology that lets you dynamically stretch your warm and cold transactional data to Microsoft Azure, enhancements to our industry-leading in-memory technologies for real-time analytics on top of breakthrough transactional performance and new in-database analytics with R integration.

Key Capabilities in SQL Server 2016 CTP2:

Always Encrypted

Always Encrypted, based on technology from Microsoft Research, protects data at rest and in motion. With Always Encrypted, 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 new 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 Azure.  You can use Always Encrypted with Stretch Database to extend 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, you will now be able to apply this tuned transaction performance technology to a significantly greater number of applications and benefit from increased concurrency.  With these enhancements, we introduce the unique capability to use our in-memory columnstore delivering 100X faster queries on top of in-memory OLTP to provide real-time operational analytics while accelerating transaction performance.

Additional capabilities in SQL Server 2016 CTP2 include:

  • PolyBase – More easily manage relational and non-relational data with the simplicity of T-SQL.
  • AlwaysOn Enhancements – Achieve even higher availability and performance of your secondaries, with up to 3 synchronous replicas, DTC support and round-robin load balancing of the secondaries.
  • Row Level Security– Enables customers to control access to data based on the characteristics of the user. Security is implemented inside the database, requiring no modifications to the application.
  • Dynamic Data Masking – Supports real-time obfuscation of data so data requesters do not get access to unauthorized data.  Helps protect sensitive data even when it is not encrypted.
  • Native JSON support – Allows easy parsing and storing of JSON and exporting relational data to JSON.
  • Temporal Database support – Tracks historical data changes with temporal database support.
  • Query Data Store – Acts as a flight data recorder for a database, giving full history of query execution so DBAs can pinpoint expensive/regressed queries and tune query performance.
  • MDS enhancements – Offer enhanced server management capabilities for Master Data Services.
  • Enhanced hybrid backup to Azure – Enables faster backups to Microsoft Azure and faster restores to SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines.  Also, you can stage backups on-premises prior to uploading to Azure.

Read more about it here.

More about the topics: CTP2, database, download, enterprise, microsoft, SQL Server 2016

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