It’s been an incredible year for the data business at Microsoft and an incredible year for data across the industry. This Thursday at our Data Driven event in New York, we will kick off a wave of launch activities for SQL Server 2016 with general availability later this year. This is the most significant release of SQL Server that we have ever done, and brings with it some fantastic new capabilities. SQL Server 2016 delivers:
- Groundbreaking security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory to deliver maximum security protection
- In-memory database support for every workload with performance increases up to 30-100x
- Incredible Data Warehousing performance with the #1, #2 and #3 TPC-H 10 Terabyte benchmarks for non-clustered performance, and as of March 7, the #1 SAP SD Two-Tier performance benchmark on Windows1
- Business Intelligence for every employee on every device – including new mobile BI support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices
- Advanced analytics using our new R support that enables customers to do real-time predictive analytics on both operational and analytic data
- Unique cloud capabilities that enable customers to deploy hybrid architectures that partition data workloads across on-premises and cloud based systems to save costs and increase agility
These improvements, and many more, are all built into SQL Server and bring you not just a new database but a complete platform for data management, business analytics and intelligent apps – one that can be used in a consistent way across both on-premises and the cloud. In fact, over the last year we’ve been using the SQL Server 2016 code-base to run in production more than 1.4 million SQL Databases in the cloud using our Azure SQL Database as a Service offering, and this real-world experience has made SQL Server 2016 an incredibly robust and battle-hardened data platform.
Gartner recently named Microsoft as leading the industry in their Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems in both execution and vision. We’re also a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, and Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms, as well as leading in vision in the Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms.
Extending SQL Server to Also Now Run on Linux
Today I’m excited to announce our plans to bring SQL Server to Linux as well. This will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.
SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in.
“This is an enormously important decision for Microsoft, allowing it to offer its well-known and trusted database to an expanded set of customers”, said Al Gillen, group vice president, enterprise infrastructure, at IDC. “By taking this key product to Linux Microsoft is proving its commitment to being a cross platform solution provider. This gives customers choice and reduces the concerns for lock-in. We would expect this will also accelerate the overall adoption of SQL Server.”
“SQL Server’s proven enterprise experience and capabilities offer a valuable asset to enterprise Linux customers around the world,” said Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies, Red Hat. “We believe our customers will welcome this news and are happy to see Microsoft further increasing its investment in Linux. As we build upon our deep hybrid cloud partnership, spanning not only Linux, but also middleware, and PaaS, we’re excited to now extend that collaboration to SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, bringing enterprise customers increased database choice.”
“We are delighted to be working with Microsoft as it brings SQL Server to Linux,” said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical. “Customers are already taking advantage of Azure Data Lake services on Ubuntu, and now developers will be able to build modern applications that utilize SQL Server’s enterprise capabilities.”
Bringing SQL Server to Linux is another way we are making our products and new innovations more accessible to a broader set of users and meeting them where they are. Just last week, we announced our agreement to acquire Xamarin. Recently, we also announced Microsoft R Server , our technologies based on our acquisition of Revolution Analytics, with support for Hadoop and Teradata.
The private preview of SQL Server on Linux is available starting today and we look forward to working with the community, our customers and our partners to bring it to market.
Please join me Satya Nadella, Joseph Sirosh and Judson Althoff at our Data Driven event on Thursday to hear more about this news and how Microsoft is helping customers transform their business using data.
Thanks,
Scott
To find out more about SQL Server on Linux, you can sign up to get regular updates and provide input to the team.
1 Benchmark Certification #2016002: Two-tier configured SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark. Using SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 5, achieving the results of 100000 SD benchmark users using HPE Integrity Superdome X, 16 processors/288 cores/576 threads Intel E7-8890 v3 with 4096GB of main memory. Operating System: Windows Server 2012R2 with SQL Server 2014 Enterprise Edition as DBMS. For more details see: http://www.sap.com/benchmark.
[1] Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems,” by Donald Feinberg , Merv Adrian , Nick Heudecker, October 2015
[2] Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics,” by Roxane Edjlali and Mark Beyer, Feb 2016
[3] Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms,” by Josh Parenteau, Rita L. Sallam, Cindi Howson Joao Tapadinhas, Kurt Schlegel, Thomas W. Oestreich February 2016
[4] Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Advanced Analytics Platforms,” by Lisa Kart, Gareth Herschel, Alexander Linden, Jim Hare, February 2016
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