For those who haven’t noticed already:

SQL Server 2016 CTP2 (or Preview as some call it) has just been released!

This means it is play time! 🙂

You can either download a copy if you’re old school like me, or you can spin up a VM in Azure like all the cool kids.

SQL Server 2016 first public preview now available!

Some of my favorite features (although some are not yet in the preview):

  • SSIS incremental deployment model (aka deploy only 1 package to the SSIS catalog). Although I understand the reason of the SSIS team to first allow only deployments of full projects, there are a lot of customers that want this functionality.
  • Power Query in all the things! (more specifically: in SSIS and SSRS)
  • R integration in SSRS (this should allow you to do amazing things with SSRS)
  • SSRS revamp (still have to see it though, but I’m already excited!)
  • Temporal tables 
  • Live query plans (seems pretty awesome)
  • DAX enhancements (many 2 many, median, percentiles, and so on)

Here’s a good overview of what you can expect in SQL Server 2016:

BI on your terms with SQL Server 2016

Be careful, if you install Polybase, you apparently need the Oracle JRE. Boooo.

polybase_jre

Anyway, a lot of goodness and I am very excited about this release.

Â