What's new with SQL Server 2017?

Microsoft announced the preview for next release of SQL Server at Microsoft Data Amp. It’s SQL Server 2017!!!

Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2.0 is the first production-quality preview of SQL Server 2017, and it is available on both Windows and Linux. Click here to download SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.0.

Here are some of the exciting new features added to database engine

• Adaptive Query Processing – Faster query processing with improved plan quality.
• Store and analyse non-hierarchical relationships with Graph data support using node/edge query.
• Resumable online index rebuild. Now you can pause and resume the online index rebuilds
• Cluster-less Availability Groups for scaling read operations. But with you scale up for read operation, you will not get high availability.

Syntax to create AG without cluster looks like

CREATE AVAILABILITY GROUP [AG-NAME] WITH (CLUSTER_TYPE=NONE)

What’s available on SQL Server on Linux?

Operational Features

• Support for RHEL, Ubuntu, Docker
• SQL Server Linux on Docker
• Package based installs, Docker images
• Support for Open shift, Docker Swarm
• Failover clustering through pacemaker 
• Availability Groups
• SQL Agent
• Replication
• SCOM management Pack
• Log shipping
• DMV's
• Full-Text Search
• Transparent Data Encryption (TDE)

Programming Features

• In memory OLTP
• Columnstore
• Python
• Compression
• Always Encrypted
• Row Level Security
• Dynamic Data Masking
• Service broker
• Change Data Capture (CDC)
• Partitioning
• Auditing
• CLR
• JSON
• XML

Security

• Active Directory authentication coming soon!

What is not available on Linux?

• DB Mail
• Alerts
• FileTables
• Stretch DB
• PolyBase
• XPs
• Mirroring
• VSS Snapshots

Other services which are not available on Linux

• SSAS
• SSRS
• SSIS
• R service
• MDS
• DQS

Windows based SQL Server tools like SSMS and Profiler works when connected to SQL Server on Linux. Native command line tools like SQLcmd, bcp and sqlpackage are also supported on Linux.

Microsoft is also planning to release a new cross platform database admin GUI tool for doing administrative tasks. WOO HOO! This tool will work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS. And this is actually an open source project which will be available on GitHub.

Go-ahead and get your copy of SQL Server 2017 CTP and start exploring these new features

Cheers,

Naveen