News

SQL Server 2017 Debuts

• By David Ramel
• September 25, 2017

Among a bevy of data-related announcements at the Microsoft Ignite conference today in Orlando was the news that SQL Server 2017 will be generally available next Monday, Oct. 2.

That announcement was made by Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud & Enterprise, in a presentation.

He followed that up with a complementary blog post, in which he sandwiched the SQL Server news among a host of cloud-related announcements.

"This is an incredible milestone representing the first version of SQL Server to run on Windows Server, Linux, and Docker. In fact, there have been 2,000,000 pulls of the SQL Server on Linux image on Docker Hub! In addition, SQL Server 2017 enables in-database advanced machine learning with support for scalable Python and R-based analytics. This means you can train advanced models easily with data inside SQL Server without having to move data," Guthrie said.

According to its site, the long-awaited SQL Server 2017 provides developers with a choice of programming languages and platforms, features industry-leading performance, sports strong security, provides real-time intelligence insights and can serve up end-to-end mobile business intelligence (BI).

Another big change with SQL Server 2017 is its availability on Linux, and Microsoft also announced its marriage with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

"As Microsoft's reference Linux platform for SQL Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux extends the enterprise database and analytics capabilities of SQL Server by delivering it on the industry-leading platform for performance, security features, stability, reliability, and manageability," Rohan Kumar, general manager, Data Systems Group said.

In an article titled "Microsoft Launches SQL Server 2017," our sister site Redmond Magazine provides details about several new features in SQL Server 2017, including: automatic tuning; a new graph engine; resumable online index rebuilds; and much more.

In other data-related news, Microsoft announced the upcoming public preview of SQL Database Managed Instance, along with and Azure Database Migration Service previews.

Related to that, the company announced the addition of the new Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server, which it said "enables customers to use on-premises SQL Server licenses for the easiest lift and shift of SQL Server workloads to fully-managed cloud."

Another preview -- this one for Azure Data Factory -- will showcase new hybrid data integration capabilities, including the ability to run SSIS packages within the service.

In the serverless computing arena, Microsoft announced support for working with Azure Functions with Azure Cosmos DB, the company's globally distributed, multi-model database service.

"Finally, dramatic scale investments are coming to Azure SQL Data Warehouse for double the performance and 5x the scale," Kumar said.

The Ignite conference runs through Friday.