{"id":83,"date":"2015-05-27T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/dataplatforminsider\/2015\/05\/27\/sql-server-2016-first-public-preview-now-available\/"},"modified":"2024-01-22T22:52:16","modified_gmt":"2024-01-23T06:52:16","slug":"sql-server-2016-first-public-preview-now-available","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/sql-server\/blog\/2015\/05\/27\/sql-server-2016-first-public-preview-now-available\/","title":{"rendered":"SQL Server 2016 first public preview now available!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three weeks ago at Microsoft Ignite, we announced SQL Server 2016<\/a>, the next major release of Microsoft\u2019s flagship database and analytics platform, as well key innovations<\/a> in the release.\u00a0 Today we are pleased to announce the first public Community Technology Preview (CTP2) for SQL Server 2016.\u00a0 This public preview gives an early look into many of the capabilities in the release and allows early adopters to get engaged by testing the preview in their environments or via a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

SQL Server 2016 provides breakthrough performance for mission critical applications and deeper insights on your data across on-premises and cloud. Top capabilities for the release include: Always Encrypted – a new capability that protects data at rest and in motion, Stretch Database – new technology that lets you dynamically stretch your warm and cold transactional data to Microsoft Azure, enhancements to our industry-leading in-memory technologies for real-time analytics on top of breakthrough transactional performance and new in-database analytics with R integration.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Unique in this release of SQL Server, we are bringing capabilities to the cloud first in Microsoft Azure SQL Database such as Row-level security and Dynamic Data Masking and then bringing the capabilities, as well as the learnings from running these at hyper-scale in Microsoft Azure, back to SQL Server to deliver proven features at scale to our on-premises offering.\u00a0 This means all our customers benefit from our investments and learnings in Azure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Key Capabilities in SQL Server 2016 CTP2<\/b><\/p>\n

Always Encrypted<\/b><\/p>\n

Always Encrypted, based on technology from Microsoft Research<\/a>, protects data at rest and in motion. With Always Encrypted, SQL Server can perform operations on encrypted data and best of all, the encryption key resides with the application in the customers trusted environment. Encryption and decryption of data happens transparently inside the application which minimizes the changes that have to be made to existing applications.<\/p>\n

Stretch Database<\/b><\/p>\n

This new technology allows you to dynamically stretch your warm and cold transactional data to Microsoft Azure, so your operational data is always at hand, no matter the size, and you benefit from the low cost of Azure.\u00a0 You can use Always Encrypted with Stretch Database to extend data in a more secure manner for greater peace of mind.<\/p>\n

Real-time Operational Analytics & In-Memory OLTP<\/b><\/p>\n

For In-Memory OLTP, which customers today are using for up to 30x faster transactions, you will now be able to apply this tuned transaction performance technology to a significantly greater number of applications and benefit from increased concurrency.\u00a0 With these enhancements, we introduce the unique capability to use our in-memory columnstore delivering 100X faster queries on top of in-memory OLTP to provide real-time operational analytics while accelerating transaction performance. <\/b><\/p>\n

Additional capabilities in SQL Server 2016 CTP2 include:<\/p>\n