Microsoft Provides Preview of SQL Server 2016

Defining Deep Data: What It Is and How to Use It

At the Professional Association of SQL Server (PASS) Summit 2015 conference today, Microsoft announced that a community technology preview (CTP) edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is now available.

New features in the next major upgrade of Microsoft SQL Server include the ability to run both transactions and analytics in memory, encryption that is always turned on, built-in support for the T programming language, support for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and the ability to federate queries across SQL Server and data sources such as Hadoop running in the cloud. As part of that effort, Microsoft also announced that Operational Analytics in Azure SQL Database is now generally available.

Finally, Microsoft notes that in this release are embedded business intelligence capabilities that Microsoft is pledging to make accessible via mobile devices in the months ahead; additional features in the Azure Data Lake are also now available for preview.

Microsoft Data Group Corporate Vice President Joseph Sirosh says we now live in the age of data. Every data set essentially has its own IP address through which it can be connected with other data sets on the fly. The end result is an unprecedented ability to combine data in and out of the cloud at will, says Sirosh. That only works, adds Sirosh, when IT organizations choose to work with vendors that are committed to building stacks of software needed to work both in the cloud and on premise, all built into the software, versus requiring them to bolt on add-on components such as backup and recovery and synchronous replication software that drive up their total cost of ownership.

The degree to which IT organizations appreciate that inherent hybrid cloud computing capability is debatable. But as cloud computing evolves, it’s clear that from a software perspective at least, the line between where one data center begins and another ends gets blurrier with each passing day.