News

Latest SQL Server 2016 Preview Improves In-Memory OLTP

• By David Ramel
• December 1, 2015

New in-memory online transaction processing (OLTP) improvements highlight the new features in the latest Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2016, the flagship RDBMS from Microsoft.

SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.1 features improvements to in-memory OLTP such as unique indexes in memory-optimized tables, building upon support for unique constraints in CTP 3, released in October. Related enhancements include LOB data types and Indexes with NULLable key columns in memory-optimized tables.

Other highlights of the new CTP listed by Microsoft include:

• Programmability improvement for the AT TIME ZONE clause.
• Enhancements to SQL Server Analysis Services.
• PowerPivot and SSRS/Power View are now available for SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2.

The SQL Server team noted that this release fully embraces the company's "Cloud First" philosophy, having been first run in production on the SQL Azure Database service before the release build.

"As part of our new rapid release model, you don't have to wait several months for responses to feedback or to test new capabilities," a blog post read yesterday. "This means you can accelerate testing and time to production. The frequent updates are also engineered to be of the same quality as major CTPs, so you don't have to be concerned about build quality. You also have the flexibility to choose which CTPs you will deploy for development and test environments and won't be forced to upgrade to the most recent preview release.

To examine more improvements coming in the linchpin of Microsoft's data-driven products and services, read about the "Top 7 Features Coming to SQL Server 2016."