Today I took a look at the video of the Keynote session at Microsoft Connect 2016 conference. If you are a SQL Server developer I strongly recommend taking a look at the video. It is an hour well-spent.
Beginning with last year’s announcement that a version of SQL Server will be available on Linux, Microsoft has been undergoing a complete about-face in regard to open source, collaboration, and all the new technologies that they had been more or less ignoring.
I like this turnabout. I think it might stir up some excitement in Redmond and wake the lethargic giant. This movement has already posted incredible benefits for SQL Server users.
Immediate Benefits
For example, at the conference Scott Guthrie, Microsoft VP announced that many of the “Enterprise Only” features in SQL Server are now available in all editions of SQL 2016 service pack 1 and beyond. This includes SQL Express (the free edition). Imagine that right now you can have:
- In-memory OLTP
- Data Warehousing
- Operational Analytics like R
- Advanced compression and partitioning functionality
- Always Encrypted
- Polybase
All this comes in whatever edition of SQL 2016 SP1 you have.
As a practical matter, serious development shops might still need one of the paid editions. Many of the Enterprise-Only management features like Always On will still be Enterprise Only.
However these immediate changes are just the tip of the iceberg. Big things are in the offing and they are mostly for developers. I am terribly jealous of the opportunities afforded to SQL developers today.
For the record, I used to be a developer, first on Oracle but then on SQL Server. Somewhere along the way I took a job that pushed me into the database world of SQL Server. Most of what I know now is about SQL Server.
But what I saw at Connect 2016 stunned me. Unfortunately I am not a developer anymore and I am not the person to explain these new development technologies to you. View the Video.
It is the best place to start learning about the new order of things at Microsoft.