9 Amazing features of SQL SERVER 2016

Although, I know I am bit late to share this thing on our blog but it says in Indian proverb “Der aai durust aai” means it’s OK you came late but you came that is more important.
Anyways, so you all might aware that Microsoft launched SQL SERVER 2016 officially in June 2016.
You can download the SQL Server 2016 via Link.
Obviously, this is a new revolution in SQL SERVER series. You will find many great features in this version.
This post is beginning to explore all those great features and we will do deep dive in all those features. In this, post we briefly introducing those features. so, without wasting time let me share a brief introduction.
 
1) JSON in SQL SERVER :-
Is this surprising to you ? Obviously, yes. As you might aware that most of the NO SQL database use either JSON or XML. As XML feature already exists in SQL SERVER so this was time for JSON. You can play with JSON in SQL SERVER 2016.
 
2)Always Encrypted :-
If you talk about security this one the best feature. Now, you are thinking what it means. So, It means that the data in the SQL SERVER reside always in encrypted format and SQL server can perform the operation on the encrypted data without decrypting it. The encryption key can be exist in some other system. With this, feature you can secure you ensure that your data is secure from the person like DBA / Developer as well. These guys also can’t see the actual data. Isn’t it neat ?
 
3) Row Level Security :-
This is another interesting feature which helpful especially to the developers  who needs to write extra code to check this. Let me explain this with an example suppose you have a sales team who do market research and you want to restrict that each sales manager can see only those data which entered by him only in such cases you don’t need to write specific condition in your code. It can be achieved by Row Level Security.
 
4) “R” in SQL SERVER :-
For the data scientist, it is a great NEWS. As Resolution Analytics is purchased by Microsoft and It is incorporated in SQL SERVER. You can run R analysis query in SQL Server.
 
5) Temporal Table:-
The Temporal table holds the old version of ROWS of a table. It means that it maintain a copy of the old rows in the table whenever there is an update on the main table.
 
6) PolyBase :-
With the help of this feature, you can access data which exist in Azure Blob or Hadoop cluster using the same SQL server. In the nutshell, we can say this is the technology which combines both relational & non-relational database in a single umbrella which is SQL SERVER. You can run the query directly on external data like Hadoop or Azure blob storage.
 
7) Stretch Database:-
I am pretty much sure by the name you can guess this feature. So, with the Stretch database you have can store your part of the data in the cloud which depends upon your need. You can say most recent transactional data you can store in your local environment and other old data you can store in Azure.
 
8)Query store :-
Another interesting feature to help you in identifying  performance drag using Query store. When you enable this feature it automatically captures a history of queries , plans,  and statics and retain them for review and resolve the performance issues.
 
9) Mobile report:-
As mentioned earlier this is the revolution in SQL SERVER 2016. In SSRS there are many important changes introduced. Now we can import Power BI report in SSRS and apart from this you can create a mobile report which you can run on Mobile.
 
Now, we started officially SQL SERVER 2016 tutorial series.
 
Moving forward we are going to discuss all these features in details and also the couple of new things which introduced in SQL SERVER 2016.
 
enjoy.
Happy VijayDashmi.