The SQL Server team has announced the latest CTP for SQL Server 2019:
Big data clusters
– Scale out by supporting deployment configurations with an increased number of SQL Server instances in the compute pool. You can now specify up to 4 instances in the compute pool for optimal performance of your queries against data pool, storage pool, or other external data sources.
– The mssqlctl utility includes updates to ease the big data cluster management experience with enhancements to the login experience. There is also a new command to list the cluster endpoints.
– Persistent volumes abstract the details of how the storage is provided and how it’s consumed. In this release, we’re enhancing the supported storage configurations by enabling you to customize storage classes independently for logs and data. With these changes, we also consolidated the storage configurations for big data components, so that the number of persistent volume claims for a big data cluster has been reduced for a default minimum configuration cluster.
There are a few other changes announced in this CTP. Now that we’re at 3.0, the light is at the end of the tunnel.