New version of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is GA. The product announcements through Technet's blog post is here. Interesting features that come out with this release. One of them is a stretch database which allows transactional databases with large amounts of historical data to be migrated to Azure.
You're able to stretch warm and cold transactional data dynamically from SQL Server to Microsoft Azure with SQL Server Stretch Database. The data is always online and available to query and you can provide longer data retention timelines for large tables like Customer Order History on cheaper storage than your On-premise storage.
Another interesting feature is Temporal tables which bring a new type of user table in SQL Server 2016, designed to keep a full history of data changes and allow easy point in time analysis
Up to 48 percent performance increase.
Microsoft claims the new SQL Server 2016 more performant than a previous release.
Quote:
Our focus for SQL Server 2016 was to deliver great value for our customers with dramatic improvements while keeping the price the same. Simply by upgrading to SQL 2016, many customer workloads experienced large performance gains. For example, the 3TB TPC-H benchmark on the same hardware demonstrated a forty-eight percent performance gain.
Temporal Tables – system-versioned temporal tables as a database feature that brings built-in support for providing information about data stored in the table at any point in time rather than only the data that is correct at the current moment in time. Temporal is a database feature that was introduced in ANSI SQL 2011 and is now supported in SQL Server 2016.
JSON Support – the product is able to:
- parse JSON text and read or modify values.
- Transform arrays of JSON objects into table format.
- Use any Transact SQL query on the converted JSON objects.
- Format the results of Transact-SQL queries in JSON format.
The product comes with 5 different version:
Licensing model: (Check the full licensing PDF here)
The SQL Express Edition comes in 3 flavors: ( For up to 10 GB of maximum disk size.)
- SQL Server 2016 Express LocalDB (MSI installer) – a lightweight version of Express that has all its programmability features yet runs in user mode and has a fast, zero-configuration installation. LocalDB does not accept remote connections, and cannot be administered remotely.
- SQL Server 2016 Express with Advanced Services – full feature set of SQL Server Express. There is a Database Engine, Reporting Services, and Full Text Search features.
- SQL Server 2016 Express – A core Express database server, and includes the Database Engine feature only. Use this if you need a lightweight download and install, need to accept remote connections or administer remotely, and do not need the Reporting Services or Full Text Search features – Download.
The blog source
