SQL Server 2016

It was time for the next version of SQL Server! At this year's Ignite, it was revealed that this summer will see the first public preview of 2016. The major updates are mainly on the security and cloud/bi side.

Among other things, we find improvements for row-level security, dynamic data masking and finally an encryption solution, "Always Encrypted", where SQL Server seems to be able to handle encrypted data both physically on disk and during operations. The key is at the client level and all encryption/decryption is done there too, completely transparently! Perfect for those of you who are worried about managing data in the cloud and along with another new feature "Strech database". "Strech database" is a hybrid solution where parts of a database are located locally and parts are located in the cloud, which can be interesting for e.g. cheaper management of large amounts of data that is not used that frequently but must be available.

They also promise improvements for In-Memory OLTP and some interesting additions for AlwaysOn including multiple synchronous replicas, secondary load balancing and support for secondaries in Azure.

For BI, they are adding more tools for advanced analytics and building PolyBase into the product so it will be possible to use T-SQL for both structured and unstructured data.

It will be exciting to follow this news and we will come back to several of them later on when Microsoft releases more details!

/Björn