Microsoft announced the release of SQL Server 2016 in May 2015. Since that time a number of Community Technical
It will not be too long until SQL Server 2016 tili ts ready for shipping.
There are many new features , here a few we like:
Always Encrypted
With the Always Encrypted feature enabled SQL Server data will always be encrypted while within SQL Server. Always Encrypted enables client application owners to control who gets access to see their applications confidential data. The client application has the encryption key and that key is never passed to SQL Server.
If you want to store confidential data in a cloud managed database then it can be always encrypted even to your cloud provider.
Dynamic Data Mask
Dynamic data masking can obscure confidential columns of data in a table to SQL Server for users that are not authorized to see the all the data. For instance for define a masking rules so that unauthorized logins can only read the last four digits of a credit card number, whereas authorized logins can see all of the credit card information.
JSON Support
JSON – Java Script Object Notation. SQL Server 2016 can interchange JSON data between applications and the SQL Server database engine. This gives SQL Server the ability to parse JSON formatted data to be stored in a relation format. With JSON support also turn relational data, into JSON formatted data. .
Multiple TempDB Database Files
It has been a best practice to have more than one tempdb data file when running on a multi-core machine. In prior tSQL Server versions , you had to manually add the additional tempdb data files after you installed SQL Server. With SQL Server 2016 you can configure the number of tempdb files while installing SQL Server.
PolyBase
Use PolyBase to write adhoc Transact SQL statements queries to join relational data from SQL Server with semi-structured data stored in Hadoop, or SQL Azure blob storage. Get data from Hadoop without knowing the internals of Hadoop. Leverage SQL Server’s on the fly column store indexing to optimize queries against semi-structured data
Query Store
Prior versions of SQL Server can see existing execution plans by using dynamic management views (DMVs) but, those DMVs only allow you to see the plans that are actively in the plan cache. You can’t see any history for plans once they are rolled out of the plan cache. The Query Store feature, saves historical execution plans. and also saves the query statistics for those historical plans.
Row Level Security
With Row Level Security the SQL database engine can restrict access to row data, based on a SQL Server login. Security policies will ensure the filters get executed for every SELECT or DELETE operation. Implementing row level security at the database layer means application developers will no longer need to maintain code to restrict data from some logins, while allowing other logins to access all the data. With this new feature, when someone queries a tables that contains row level security they will not even know whether or not any rows of data were filtered out.
R Comes to SQL Server
Revolution Analytics is now available inside of SQL Server to support advance analytics against big data. This will eliminate the need to export your SQL server data to perform R processing
Stretch Database
Stretch the storage of your On-Premise database to Azure SQL Database. The stretch database feature allows you to have your most frequently accessed data stored On-Premise, while your less accessed data is off-site in an Azure SQL databases.
When you enable a database to “stretch”, the older data starts moving over to the Azure SQL database behind the scenes. When you run a query that might access active and historical information in a “stretched” database the database engine seamlessly queries both the On-Premise database as well as Azure SQL database and returns the results to you as though the data comes from a single source. This feature will make it easy for DBA’s to archive information to a cheaper storage media without having to change any actual application code. Maximize performance on those active On-Premise queries.
Temporal Table
A temporal table is table holds old versions of rows within a base table. Use temporal tables in SQL Server to automatically move old row versions to the temporal table every time a row in the base table is updated. The temporal table is physically a different table then the base table, but is linked to the base table. This simplifies the management of row versioning.
Where to find Additional Informationabout SQL Server 2016.
SQL Server 2016 data sheet: http://download.microsoft.com/download/F/D/3/FD33C34D-3B65-4DA9-8A9F-0B456656DE3B/SQL_Server_2016_datasheet.pdf
SQL Server 2016 release notes: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/dn876712.aspx
What’s new in SQL Server, September Update: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/bb500435.aspx
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