Category: Versions

Glenn Berry explains that the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server is still important for enterprises:

If you are using Columnstore indexes, you get the following performance benefits automatically, when you use Enterprise Edition:

• Aggregate Pushdown: This performance feature often gives a 2X-4X query performance gain by pushing qualifying aggregates to the SCAN node, which reduces the number of rows coming out of that iterator.

• Index Build/Rebuild: Enterprise Edition can build/rebuild columnstore indexes with multiple processor cores, while Standard Edition only uses one processor core. This has a pretty significant effect on elapsed times for these operations, depending on your hardware.

• Local Aggregates: Enterprise Edition can use local aggregations to filter the number of rows passing out of a SCAN node, reducing the amount of work that needs to be done by subsequent query nodes. You can confirm this by looking for the “ActualLocallyAggregatedRows” attribute in the XML of the execution plan for the query.

Glenn’s focus is around columnstore indexes and DBCC CHECKDB, but there are additional benefits as well, with the separator being improved performance rather than different feature surface areas.

Denis Gobo notes that there’s a new CTP for SQL Server:

TRANSLATE

This acts like a bunch of replace statements, instead of REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(SomeVal,'[‘,'(‘),’]’,,’)’),'{‘,'(‘),’}’,,’)’) you can do the following which is much cleaner

SELECT TRANSLATE('2*[3+4]/{7-2}', '[]{}', '()()');

Running that will return 2*(3+4)/(7-2)

The translate function looks very interesting.  Click through for a few more goodies and get ready for the never-ending release cycle.

Parikshit Savjani explains limitations in SQL Server 2016 SP1:

With the recent announcement of SQL Server 2016 SP1, we announced the consistent programmability experience for developers and ISVs, who can now maintain a single code base and build intelligent database applications which scale across all the editions of SQL Server. The processor, memory and database size limits does not change and remain as–in all editions as documented in the SQL Server editions page. We have made the following changes in our documentation to accurately reflect the memory limits on lower editions of SQL Server. This blog post is intended to clarify and provide more information on the memory limits starting with SQL Server 2016 SP1 on Standard, Web and Express Editions of SQL Server.

The development space has been expanded, but there’s still good reason for enterprises to use Enterprise Edition.

James Serra notes that SQL Server Extremely Expensive Edition has a new version out:

This release is built on the latest SQL Server 2016 release, offers additional language surface coverage to aid in migrations from SQL Server and other platforms, adds PolyBase connectivity to the current versions of Hadoop from Hortonworks, additional PolyBase security with Kerberos support and credential support for Azure Storage Blobs, greater indexing and collation support and improvements to the setup and upgrade experience with FQDN support.

The majority of these capabilities have shipped in the monthly releases of Azure SQL Data Warehouse service and/or SQL Server 2016 following the cloud first principle of shipping, getting feedback, and improving rapidly across all of our products.

Click through for the list of enhancements.  There are quite a few of them.

James Serra walks through all of the Microsoft Connect(); announcements:

Microsoft Connect(); is a developer event from Nov 16-18, where plenty of announcements are made.  Here is a summary of the data platform related announcements:

SQL Server 2016 SP1 was the huge announcement, but there are several other interesting announcements, including Kafka for HDInsight.  Click through for the list.