Shaking Hands with SQL Server 2016

I am a SQL Server lover and I was eagerly waiting for the SQL Server 2016. It is good to hear that, its public preview is available to download. Mr. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft announced SQL Server 2016 during ignite conference. If you thinking about to upgrade the SQL Server then, it is a best reason to start budgeting and planning for the upgrades in your organization. It has the ability to deliver mission-critical capabilities with operational analytics built-in. Top capability for the SQL Server 2016 is the always encrypted behavior and mainly designed to protect data in motion or rest.

Always Encrypted and Secure: This feature is the highlight of the SQL Server 2016. With this feature, SQL Server can perform operation on encrypted data and encryption key can be resided with the application in the customer trusted environment. Encryption and decryption of the data happens clearly inside the application which reduces the changes that have to be made to existing applications.

In-Memory OLTP & Real Time Operational Analytics:  In-Memory Online Transactional Processing (OLTP) is a major focus is fast performance. Maximum size of the durable table in the SQL Server 2016 is 2 TB where as in 2014 it is 256 GB. It also supports nested native procedure calls and natively-compiled scalar UDFs. It has new syntax extension to ALTER your bucket count values with the simple rebuild:
ALTER TABLE dbo.InMemoryTable
ALTER INDEX IX_NC_Hash
REBUILD WITH (BUCKET_COUNT = 1058476);

Mobile BI and PolyBase: SQL Server 2016 expands its scope beyond data warehousing, transaction processing and business intelligence to deliver the advanced analytics to know deeper insights of the data. Additionally, we are creating PloyBase into the SQL Server to expand the power of extract value structured and unstructured data using existing T-SQL skills. With this feature user can get the faster insights by rich visualization on different devices including mobile application on Windows, iOS and Android.

Stretch Database:  This awesome technology allows you to dynamically stretch your cold and warm transactional data into the Azure cloud platform, so your important operational data is always at hand without any worry of size. Always encrypted feature can be used with stretch database to extend the data in a more secure manner.

Additional Features

• Security enhancements for the Row-level security and Dynamic Data Masking to round out security investment.
• Partially support DML triggers.
• Supports indexes on NULLable columns.
• Supports foreign key.
• Analysis Services and SQL Server Enterprise Information Management (EIM) tools to get an upgrade in performance, usability and scalability.