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Richie Lee

Microsoft Release SQL Server 2016 SP1 and Give Stuff Away!

Today was the Connection(); 2016 Keynote, and it was certainly was worth tuning into to catch-up with what Microsoft have been up to. I was going to write a brief summary of the Keynote and made some notes in a text file, but an hour in to the 2 hour presentation I gave up because there was so much going on.

Microsoft have been pushing for an Incremental Service Modelling, to the point that they changed the recommendation from Cumulative Updates being deployed only if you are affected by any of the issues to always update. This change of policy indicated that Service Packs would eventually be phased out. But Microsoft are nothing if not unpredictable, and they today announce the new SQL Server 2016 SP1. And is big news.

As well as implementing all the changes from SQL Server 2014 SP2, such as CLONEDATABASE, several features which were once Enterprise-exclusive are now available in lower editions. Features like compression partitioning, In memory OLTP, columnstore are available even in Express.

The features page on MSDN is yet to be updated, but the edition comparison page plus the announcement on the SQL Server blog details what is/is not available. Note that hard limits like memory and core count are still as they were.

But on this day, aside from giving away previously Enterprise-exclusive features, Microsoft have also announced:

In case this has not been made clear to you already, this is a big news day.

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