News
Microsoft Announces SQL Server 2016 Coming June 1
SQL Server 2016 will be available starting June 1, Microsoft announced on Monday.
In a blog posted by Tiffany Wissner, senior director of Microsoft's Data Platform Marketing group, the company revealed the four versions that will be available for consumers at the beginning of next month:
- SQL Server 2016 Enterprise: This version will be Microsoft's most complete SQL Server 2016 offering, with support for unlimited number of cores, advanced data integration, mobile BI capabilities and advanced "R" statistical computing programming language, to name a few of the exclusive features.
- SQL Server 2016 Standard: Microsoft is aiming this version as a lighter offering of its database management system, with support for 24 cores and basic security enhancements.
- SQL Server 2016 Express: The company's free SQL Server offering comes with a very basic and stripped down version of the database system, with support for just four cores. Microsoft said this version will be perfect for the creation and deployment of small-scale database applications.
- SQL Server 2016 Developer: This version will provide the full feature set found in the Enterprise edition to developers looking to build data solutions on top of SQL Server. In March Microsoft made the SQL Server 2014 Developer edition free for Visual Studio Dev Essentials members and announced the same will be true when SQL Server 2016 is released.
"SQL Server 2016 is the foundation of Microsoft's data strategy, encompassing innovations that transform data into intelligent action," said Wissner." With this new release, Microsoft is delivering an end-to-end data management and business analytics solution with mission critical intelligence for your most demanding applications as well as insights on your data on any device."
The company also pointed to a newly released benchmark from Lenovo today that showcased SQL Server 2016 Enterprise running on the company's Lenovo System x2950 X6 rack server. The results showed that SQL Server 2016 outperformed database solutions in terms of speed and accuracy.
"SQL Server 2016 owns the top TPC-E performance benchmarks for transaction processing, the top TPC-H performance benchmarks for data warehousing, and the top performance benchmarks with leading business applications like PROS and KPMG," said Microsoft. "Customers can also gain tremendous performance improvement by simply upgrading to SQL Server 2016 without application changes (e.g. queries will run up to 34x faster). In addition to leading performance benchmarks, SQL Server 2016 also delivers top price/performance for both workloads."
Along with claiming better performance with SQL Server 2016 to attract new customers, the company is also looking to convert Oracle database users by bringing them onboard for free. Until June 30, Oracle customers can switch to SQL Server 2016 with the appropriate licenses for free (Software Assurance subscription is required).
Microsoft's latest SQL Server 2016 has been in testing stages for over a year now, with the current version, SQL Server 2016 RC3, available for download. Microsoft said that the current test version is "essentially feature complete," and have not indicated if any additional features that aren't available will make it to the final release.