New Features in SQL Server 2016

1. Always Encrypted:

Always Encrypted is designed to protect data at rest or in motion. With Always Encrypted, SQL Server can perform operations on encrypted data and the encryption key can reside with the application. Encryption and decryption of data happens transparently inside the application. This means the data stored in SQL Server will be encrypted which can secure it from DBA and administrators but that also has considerations for ad-hoc queries, reporting and exporting the data.

2. Stretch Database:

The idea behind this feature is certainly interesting. The upcoming stretch database feature will allow you to dynamically stretch your on-premise database to Azure. This would enable your frequently accessed or hot data to stay on-premise and your infrequently accessed cold data to be moved to the cloud. This could enable you to take advantage of low cost Azure store and still have high performance applications. However, this is one trick where Microsoft really needs to get the partitioning right to keep your queries from straying into the cloud and killing your performance.

3. Real-time Operational Analytics:

This feature uses the dynamic duo of SQL Server’s in-memory technologies; it combines In-Memory OLTP with the in-memory columnstore for real-time operational analytics. Its purpose is to tune your system for optimal transactional performance as well as increase workload concurrency. This sounds like a great combination and applying analytics to your system’s performance is something a lot of customers have asked for a long time but you will certainly need to have the memory to take advantage of it.

4. PolyBase into SQL Server:

Big Data continues to grow in strategic importance but unless you had the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) connecting SQL Server to Dig Data and Hadoop in particular was limited and difficult. In previous releases, PDW was the only version of SQL Server that came with PolyBase – a technology that bridged SQL Server and Hadoop by enabling you to construct and run SQL queries over Hadoop data stores eliminating the need to understand HDFS or MapReduce. SQL Server 2016 promises to bring the PolyBase technology mainstream into the primary SQL Server SKUs (probably the Enterprise edition).

5. Native JSON Support:

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a standardized data exchange format that is currently not supported natively by SQL Server. To perform JSON imports and exports you need to hand-code complex T-SQL, SQLCLR or JavaScript. SQL Server 2016 promises to simply this by incorporating JSON support directly into SQL Server much like XML. SQL Server 2016 will natively parse and store JSON as relational data and will support exporting relational data to JSON.

6. Enhancements to AlwaysOn:

SQL Server 2016 will also continue to advance high availability and disaster recovery with several enhancements to AlwaysOn. The upcoming SQL Server 2016 release will enhance AlwaysOn with the ability to have up to three synchronous replicas. Additionally, it will include DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator) support as well as support for round-robin load balancing of the secondaries replicas. There will also be support for automatic failover based on database health.

7. Enhanced In-Memory OLTP:

First introduced with SQL Server 2014, In-Memory OLTP will continue to mature in SQL Server 2016. Microsoft will enhance In-Memory OLTP by extending the functionality to more applications while also enhancing concurrency. This means they will be expanding the T-SQL surface area, increasing the total amount of memory supported into the terabyte range as well as supporting a greater number of parallel CPUs.

8. Revamped SQL Server Data Tools:

Another welcome change in SQL Server 2016 is the reconsolidation of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). As Microsoft worked to supplant the popular and useful Business Development Studio (BIDS) with SQL Server Data Tools they wound up confusing almost everyone by creating not one but two versions of SQL Server Data Tools both of which needed to be downloaded separately from installing SQL Server itself. With the SQL Server 2016 release Microsoft has indicated that they intend to reconsolidate SQL Server Data Tools.