SELECT features FROM bumf... What's new in MS SQL Server 2016

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2016, adding new security features, improved query profiling, Hadoop integration, hybrid cloud capabilities, and R analytics to its database server, along with numerous other improvements. Calling SQL Server a "database server" does not do justice to its scope. The main components are: …

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's lovely but

... I'll stick with Postgres and MariaDB. They install in seconds as the *ahem* "developer edition" and with a little tweaking I get the "Enterprise edition" as well. Installing any edition of MSSQL is a major event and generally takes from at least 10 mins to bloody ages.

R? *meh* - used it for years.

We are also not adverse to spinning up Elasticsearch and MongoDB as needed for other jobs. I'm happy with a diverse ecosystem but prefer to avoid monolithic nonsense like MSSQL or Oracle (int al).

I'm sure there will be a damn good reason why you might specify this thing but it's not for me. In my company we try to avoid burning money and that's an attitude that has stood us in good stead for some time now.

[CheesyTheClown]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

Postgres and Maria are great products and if you are happy with them, good luck.

Some of us depend on things like full support for scalability. MSSQL scales like crazy. Postgres and Maria do pretty well these days too, but if you need to store 400,000,000 records replicated across 50 data centers and processed by 400 transaction servers for processing stored procedures... They're pretty lightweight. I suppose it could be done, but it probably would be almost impossible to manage.

MSSQL is actually pretty good for massive scale. It's just another DB for normal scale. It's sweet for embedded. What I don't know is why anyone would use Oracle.

[Hans 1]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

>Some of us depend on things like full support for scalability. MSSQL scales like crazy.

BS, and the worst thing is, you know, you must know ... as scalability is, along with locking, the weak points of MS SQL ... Even MS admits scalability is not their "strongest point":

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/09/microsoft_sql_server_2014_bug/

Maybe, just maybe you forgot the joke alert icon ...

Now, on to the next BS:

>They're pretty lightweight. I suppose it could be done, but it probably would be almost impossible to manage.

What are you on ? There are plenty of management solutions out there for enterprise deployments of postgres of maria/mysql ...these management solutions also allow you to manage Windows boxen better than MS AD, along with Macs, Linux, or Unix boxen, any phone, router, or any mobes you might need to manage ...puppet, to name a popular one.

As for "sweet for embeeded", what do you mean with embedded ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embedded_system

You, sir, have no clue ... what are you doing round here ? Your Crayola are over there!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

I think you're also missing the point. Puppet is a configuration management system, not a data scaling system.

Puppet is fine for rolling many PostgreSQL instances out there, but the guys are talking about scaling data. So can you send us a link to how you shard data based on geographical locations in PostgreSQL for 1000 systems please?

[Hans 1]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

>I think you're also missing the point. Puppet is a configuration management system, not a data scaling system.

>Puppet is fine for rolling many PostgreSQL instances out there, but the guys are talking about scaling data. So can you send us a link to how you shard data based on geographical locations in PostgreSQL for 1000 systems please?

There are many, come on ... note that MS SQL is not even mentioned in the wikipedia article on the matter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_%28database_architecture%29

Ok, here is one, https://www.citusdata.com/solutions/infrastructure/scaling-out-postgresql

As for MariaDB, it is "transparent", ouch I knw ... I was laughing and looking for the job alert icon because, as far as I know, the capabilities of MS SQL server in this respect are pretty poor compared to the competition.

As others have pointed out, some "quite" large implementations of these solutions are used through-out the biggest powerhouses on the internet .... NOT ONE IS USING MS SQL Server ... maybe, Azure, but then again, they allocate Gb's of memory for a query that finally gobs up all the RAM ... when the third azure client actually connects ...

Azure, the cloud solution most MS-only houses have "bought", that almost nobody uses, and MS SQL still cannot cope with the few that are actively using it ... ROFL.

I wonder why you are anon ?

As for puppet, it allows you to easily manage all those servers centrally, makes sense ?

[batfastad]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

@Cheesy

> Postgres and Maria do pretty well these days too

They really do, for several years. Facebook, Twitter, Google etc global installations of these will make your MSSQL deployment look like a hobby lab.

[Adam 52]

Re: gerdesj

Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses as Sir Humphrey would say. You seem to have missed the entire point of the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

" I'll stick with Postgres and MariaDB"

Vastly inferior performance to MS SQL server though, and they don't scale anywhere near as well out of the box. You get what you pay for...

[werdsmith]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

Depends what you are doing with it. Mongo scales like crazy.

[TheVogon]

Re: I'm sure it's lovely but

" Mongo scales like crazy."

Because Mongo doesn't care if your data is transactionally consistent or even is committed to disk... For that sort of scalability you can just write to /dev/nul

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm...

Maybe I missed it in TFA, but... ballpark price for the different editions?

[A Non e-mouse]

Re: Umm...

The other issue is what MS forces you to buy. Under our license deal with MS, you have to buy a certain number of core licenses, even if you want fewer.

What MS gives with one hand, it takes with the other.

[Adam 52]

Re: Umm...

Hard to say, not much for standard edition ($2000) on a moderate 4 core server to lots ($120000) for a 16 core enterprise edition.

As commented before, the removal of BI Edition essentially means the removal of per seat licensing for Enterprise and is really going to hurt some light users.

[Tom 7]

Re: Umm...

Price of a ballpark probably.

[Tim Anderson]

Re: Umm...

Added prices now.

Tim

[choleric]

SQL statement separation

I thought it was a semicolon not an ellipsis:

SELECT features FROM bumf WHERE pretty_pictures='true';

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SQL statement separation

SQL "SELECT features FROM bumf WHERE pretty_pictures='true'" returns no results.

[wsm]

SSRS, that is all

The only reason we don't use other DBMS is because of SSRS. The report development, options and ease of putting them into secure web sites is why we use MS SQL Server. All the others cost more and offer less.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SSRS, that is all

I'm really interested to see what 2016 brings to the table. We are on 2014 and although it is light years ahead of 2008 which we just upgraded from, there are still irritating browser support issues when using in Chrome. I agree completely with your comment on ease of use and speed of development. We have both SSRS and Business Objects in our organisation.

My team develop and support SSRS with 3 people and can deploy reports in minutes. Our business objects team need weeks or months if the column isn't already in their universe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Select what?

SELECT new FROM features WHERE bullshit=NULL HAVING cost=0 ORDER BY importance;

or this:

USE maria_db;

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Select what?

"SELECT new FROM features WHERE bullshit=NULL HAVING cost=0 ORDER BY importance;"

bullshit=NULL won't work, needs to be bullshit IS NOT NULL

HAVING can only be used with a GROUP BY

so I'm going to go with select someone who knows standard SQL and ignore RDBMS suggestions from those who do not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Select what?

Don't you mean 'bullshit IS NULL'?

[batfastad]

Re: Select what?

As well as AC's excellent point about HAVING requiring GROUP BY.

"new" is a reserved keyword, in MySQL/Maria land anyway, so better put that in backticks.

[james.aka.damingo]

Oh wont someone think of the EULA

Some great features, and some bumph. But hey who upgrades on day one (he says installing the release version on his development server).

Just make sure you read the EULA as Brent Ozar did for us all!

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2016/06/sql-server-2016-internet-forced-updates-phoning-home

<stops install on multi instance dev server, and spins up new VM/>

[BigAndos]

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

Blimey, another one for the "excellent reasons for your SQL server not to have unfettered internet access" list!

I look forward to upgrading to this version and giving some of the new features a spin, but knowing my company I won't get the chance until the day before 2008 goes of support - if at all!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

Uhhhhh, why would you expose a DB server to an open internet connection?!

I know we tuck it behind the app servers and only 'let in' app servers/terminal access/RDP access from whitelisted clients/servers...

I mean, cloud based - sure it will auto update and send telemetry, but as if Redmond is gonna assume this function is going to work in *any* enterprise that has even a modicum of access control sense...

[Pascal]

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

> Uhhhhh, why would you expose a DB server to an open internet connection?!

The topic here is not exposing the server to the internet, but rather granting the server internet access (so the server can get critical updates, anti-virus signature updates and so on).

Definitely not a great idea but any smaller organisation without WSUS tends to default to that.

[TheVogon]

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

"but rather granting the server internet access (so the server can get critical updates, anti-virus signature updates and so on)."

Those should normally come via a managed and controlled internal infrastructure - not direct from the internet.

[Hans 1]

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

>Definitely not a great idea but any smaller organisation without WSUS tends to default to that.

No, any smaller organization should stay clear from MS SQL server ... if you are big and have money to burn, go ahead, Jim, but when you are small and need to cut costs, Windows server is DEFINITELY NOT what you want in your data center ... I know, MS SQL is coming to Linux, but that won't really help the small guyz, will it ... I am really looking forward to MS SQL Server on Linux, because, well, on Linux, they cannot hide "optimizations" in the kernel, can they ?

[TheVogon]

Re: Oh wont someone think of the EULA

"when you are small and need to cut costs, Windows server is DEFINITELY NOT what you want in your data center "

That must be why all those small cost sensitive business run lots of *nix servers then. Oh, wait. They don't. They overwhelmingly run Windows and SQL Server!

[Jon B]

As long as the icon looks pretty

SQL Server 2014 icon looks terrible in Windows 8.1 - 32x32 pixels scaled up to 2cm across

[Alan Bourke]

One PITA for developers here ...

... you can't install it on Windows 7. Way to nobble take-up, Microsoft.

[Anonymous Coward]

SQL - Amazing features in SQL Server 2016

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is now generally available to everyone from Jun 2016. It is fully loaded with several new features, including more speed, more security and more value. It provides a secure, scalable database platform that has everything built in, from advanced analytics to unparalleled in-memory performance.

http://www.sql-datatools.com/2016/06/new-features-in-sql-server-2016.html

[EarleneBarlett]

It's too expensive

I like SQL Server 2016 and use it a lot, but it's price is out of this world. I managed to find one cheaper at dangiftshop com. Worked great for me.

[rogersdba]

I prefer SQL Server b/c it's the best at overall package.BI&SSRS& ON .. ON.. It's so user friendly to use..I hear other dba's rave about other database applications but they never offer the complete package unless it's Oracle.... If your going to to purchase Oracle be prepare to open your wallet a little more.