Category: Versions

Bert Wagner has gone all Gartner on us:

I decided to rank these features on two axes: Excitement and Priority

Excitement is easy to describe: how excited I am about using these features. In my case, excitement directly correlates with performance and developer usability improvements. That doesn’t mean “Low Excitement” features aren’t beneficial; on the contrary, many are great, they just don’t top my list (it wouldn’t be fun to have a quadrant with everything in the top right).

Priority is how quickly I’ll work on implementing or tuning these features. The truth is that some of these features will work automatically once a SQL Server instance is upgraded, while some will require extra work (ie. query rewriting, hardware config). Once again, “Low Priority” features aren’t bad, they just won’t be the features that I focus on first.

I might need to give him a PolyBase pep talk and bump that one up and to the right a little.

Niko Neugebauer is jazzed about SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition:

The documentation has been released on the Editions & Features support in Sql Server 2019 and there are huge news that will get a good number of Standard Editions users excited.

The thing that should make every single user of the Sql Server 2019 Standard Edition jump is the presence of TDE (Transparent Database Encryption), the feature that

– every single responsible company would love to be able to use to secure their data
– that every single DBA, Developer & IT Professional kept asking Microsoft to include for so many years
– was already there since Azure SQL Database has it by default a couple of years even for the basic edition

I am beyond happy with this news. Grateful that Microsoft has listened to the common sense voice and made a security feature available for the paying customers, giving them a little bit more possibility to be conformant to such demanding norms as GDPR.

Aside from that, Niko looks at several new features which will be available in Standard Edition, as well as a few Enterprise-only features.

Brent Ozar noticed an update to Microsoft’s “what’s in which edition” document:

The most important stuff:
– Standard Edition is still capped at 128GB RAM.
– Accelerated Database Recovery is in Standard Edition.
– Automatic tuning, batch mode for row store, adaptive memory grants, adaptive joins, and memory-optimized TempDB are Enterprise Edition only.

Click through for more of Brent’s thoughts. Of interest to me is that PolyBase control nodes may now run in Standard Edition. It makes me wonder if they’ll cap that feature somehow, where you get N nodes maximum in a Standard Edition scale-out group, or if it’s uncapped like Enterprise Edition.

Amit Banerjee announces SQL Server 2019 Release Candidate 1:

Today we’re announcing the availability of the first public release candidate for SQL Server 2019, which is now available for download. SQL Server 2019 brings the industry-leading performance and security of SQL Server to Windows, Linux, and containers and can tackle any data workload from business intelligence to data warehousing to analytics and AI over all your data both structured and unstructured.

Amit’s update covers the span of what we’ve seen in all of the CTPs. I went through the release notes and did not find a huge amount of detail on what went into RC1 versus CTP 3.2. But the fact that they’re up to RCs means that SQL Server 2019 is getting close to release.