View the new capabilities of SQL Server 2016
Always Encrypted
SQL Server 2016 introduces a critical addition to your data security strategy.
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Real-time hybrid transactional/analytical processing
Combine in-memory columnstore and rowstore capabilities in SQL Server 2016 for real-time operational analytics—fast analytical processing right on your transactional data. Open up new scenarios like real-time fraud detection without impacting your transactional performance
High availability and disaster recovery
Gain mission-critical uptime, fast failover, easy setup, and load balancing of readable secondaries with enhanced AlwaysOn in SQL Server 2016—a unified solution for high availability and disaster recovery. Plus, put an asynchronous replica in an Azure Virtual Machines for hybrid high availability.
Security and compliance
Protect data at rest and in motion with a database that has the least vulnerabilities of any major platform for six years running in the NIST vulnerabilities database (National Institute of Standards and Technology, National Vulnerability Database, May 4, 2015). Security innovations in SQL Server 2016 help secure data for mission-critical workloads with a layers of protection security approach, adding Always Encrypted technology along with row-level security, dynamic data masking, transparent data encryption (TDE), and robust auditing
#1 in price and performance—with massive scale
SQL Server consistently leads in the TPC-E OLTP workload, the TPC-H data warehousing workload, and real-world application performance benchmarks. Scale up to 640 logical processors when paired with Windows Server 2016, which delivers up to 12 TB of addressable memory for your database.
Highest performing data warehouses
Get support for small data marts to large enterprise data warehouses while reducing storage needs with enhanced data compression. Scale to petabytes of data for enterprise-grade relational data warehousing—and integrate with non-relational sources like Hadoop—using scale out, massively parallel processing from Microsoft Analytics Platform System.
Corporate business intelligence
Scale your business intelligence (BI) models, enrich your data, and ensure quality and accuracy with a complete BI solution. SQL Server Analysis Services help you build comprehensive, enterprise-scale analytic solutions—benefiting from the lightning-fast performance of in-memory built into the tabular model. Reduce time to insights using direct querying against tabular and multidimensional models.
End-to-end mobile BI on any device
Gain insights and transform your business with modern, paginated reports and rich visualizations. Use SQL Server Reporting Services to publish reports to any mobile device—including Windows, Android, and iOS devices—and access reports online or offline.
Simplify big data
Get access to your data, both big and small, with PolyBase technology that queries Hadoop using simple SQL commands. In addition, new JSON support lets you parse and store JSON documents and output relational data into JSON files.
In-database advanced analytics
Build intelligent applications with SQL Server R Services. Move beyond reactive and into predictive and prescriptive analytics by performing advanced analytics directly within the database. By using multi-threading and massively parallel processing, you’ll gain insights faster than using open source R alone.
Cut storage costs with SQL Server Stretch Database
Manage fast-growing online transaction processing (OLTP) databases cost-effectively, keep historical data online and available, and have cold data quickly accessible with optimal performance. Stretch large SQL Server tables from SQL Server 2016 to Microsoft Azure with SQL Server Stretch Database—saving you up to 40 percent over building out on-premises storage.
Consistent data platform from on-premises to cloud
Get a consistent experience from on-premises to the cloud—letting you build and deploy hybrid solutions for managing your data investments. Benefit from the flexibility to run SQL Server workloads in Azure Virtual Machines, or use Azure SQL Database to scale and further simplify database management.
Easy-to-use tools
Use the skills you already have, along with familiar tools like Azure Active Directory and SQL Server Management Studio, to manage your database infrastructure across on-premises SQL Server and Microsoft Azure. Apply industry-standard APIs across various platforms and download updated developer tools from Visual Studio to build next-generation web, enterprise, business intelligence, and mobile applications.
