SQL Server 2016: Advanced Capabilities without Expensive Add-Ons
What does the industry leading SQL Server 2016 have in common with spaghetti sauce? Just the fact that if you need something, “it’s in there.” With SQL Server 2016 the advanced capabilities you need in a data platform are built in. You don’t need to purchase expensive add-ons to get necessary functionality immediately: Looking for real-time operational analytics that will help you gain insights to advance your business? It’s in there. Need outstanding performance and scalability? It’s in there: SQL Server 2016 includes optimized in-memory technology that produces up to 30x transactional performance and over100x faster queries for data warehouse and BI workloads.
As the digital economy evolves, it’s ever more crucial for your data platform to include capabilities that allow you to study past data—such as operational and social media data—to identify potential trends, or to analyze the results of campaigns or events, or to predict outcomes based on past and current data. Therefore, if you’re like most decision makers, you’re deeply concerned about how technology can enable your organization to keep up with industry trends and adapt business strategies to meet demands. Indeed, industry research shows that such concerns have been growing in the past few years. For example, in 2010, 37% of those surveyed by MIT/SLOAN Management review believed that business analytics created a competitive advantage in their organization. In 2011, that percentage increased to 58%, in 2012 the percentage had grown to 67%, and percentage continues to rise.
“Today the adoption of in-memory analytics is growing in the hopes it can deliver speed, deeper insights and allow companies to do more with the data they have to solve a variety of business problems” (Tapan Patel, In-Memory Analytics: Get Faster, Better Insights from Big Data). SQL Server 2016 addresses this need, and In-Memory processing will now enable real-time operational insights on data, both in-memory and on disk. In contrast to other in-memory technologies, SQL Server 2016 uniquely provides the speed of in-memory with operational analytics. Not only will OLTP performance be enhanced, but an increase in concurrency means customers can now take advantage of even higher parallel compute (double the compute, from 64 CPUs to 128) and memory allocations (in Terabytes).
With SQL Server 2016, operational analytics “is in there.”
SQL Server 2016 was designed to enable advanced operational analytics and to do so at industry-leading scale. Witness the fact that the top three TPC-H performance benchmarks for data warehousing workloads are held by SQL Server for non-clustered scale-up performance. And the right to deploy the SQL Server massive parallel processing (MPP) data warehousing appliance is included with the SQL Server 2016 Enterprise Edition license. Again, “it’s in there,” and at half the cost of Oracle Exadata.
As the leader and vision, SQL Server is the advanced data platform for mission-critical applications, analytics, scalability, and performance—with everything, including innovation, built in. Upcoming blog posts in this series will dive into the technical details and explain how built-in in-memory analytics, real-time operational analytics, and in-memory OLTP can give your organization an edge in today’s digital economy.
To learn more about SQL Server 2016, see what’s new in SQL Server 2016.
See the other posts in the SQL Server 2016 blogging series.
