MS SQL Server 2016

SQL Server 2016 delivers breakthrough mission-critical capabilities with in-memory performance and operational analytics built-in. Comprehensive security features like new Always Encrypted technology helps protect your data at rest and in motion, and a world class high availability and disaster recovery solution adds new enhancements to AlwaysOn technology.

Benefits:

• Enhanced in-memory performance provide up to 30x faster transactions, more than 100x faster queries than disk based relational databases and real-time operational analytics
• New Always Encrypted technology helps protect your data at rest and in motion, on-premises and in the cloud, with master keys sitting with the application, without application changes
• Built-in advanced analytics– provide the scalability and performance benefits of building and running your advanced analytics algorithms directly in the core SQL Server transactional database
• Business insights through rich visualizations on mobile devices with native apps for Windows, iOS and Android
• Simplify management of relational and non-relational data with ability to query both through standard T-SQL using PolyBase technology
• Stretch Database technology keeps more of your customer’s historical data at your fingertips by transparently stretching your warm and cold OLTP data to Microsoft Azure in a secure manner  without application changes
• Faster hybrid backups, high availability and disaster recovery scenarios to backup and restore your on-premises databases to Microsoft Azure and place your SQL Server AlwaysOn secondaries in Azure

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.