Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2016 with Enhanced Real-time Analytics

FREMONT, CA: Microsoft announces the release of its SQL Server 2016 database globally. The SQL Server 2016 includes enhancements such as in-memory column stores for real-time analytical processing.

The SQL Server 2016 includes a new paradigm where all joins, aggregations and machine learning are performed securely within the database itself, without moving the data out. This enables analytics on real-time transactions to be executed with great speed.

Microsoft also included performance improvements by re-engineering of SQL Server 2016's data processing paradigm. Keeping up with the industry standard Transaction Processing Council (TPC-H) database benchmark, Microsoft claimed to load a complex schema at 1.6 terabytes per hour on a single server with four Intel Xeon E7 processors.

The SQL Server 2016 database also provides tools for cross-platform analytics such as Polybase, which allows users to run queries on external data kept in Hadoop or Azure binary large object (BLOB) storage. Microsoft R Services, which is integrated with SQL Server also runs on multiple Hadoop distributions and is also integrated with Azure HDInsight + Spark, enabling both choice and standardization in developing analytics code. Also, R Tools for Visual Studio allows the ease of use of the modern Visual Studio IDE for developing analytical code in R.

According to the statistics compiled by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), SQL Server has the least vulnerabilities as compared to any of the major database platforms, for 6 years in a row. Microsoft now claims that SQL Server 2016 security capabilities are even more secure with its Always Encrypted, Transparent Data Encryption, Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) and Row Level Security (RLS).

The Always Encrypted database engine helps protect data at rest and in memory. Transparent Data Encryption- encrypts all user data now with low-performance overhead. The Dynamic Data Masking (DDM) and Row Level Security (RLS) features allow developers to build applications that restrict access and protect data.

The new database will be available on Microsoft's Windows Server platform, Azure Cloud and also for open source Linux distributions. The SQL Server 2016 can be deployed as a standalone system, in hybrid clouds and public clouds.