The top 5 reasons to upgrade to SQL Server 2016
Upgrading your software can be daunting, we know. The fast pace of business makes it easy to tell yourself, “I’ll do it later when I have time.” We get it! But here are five key reasons to make time to upgrade to SQL Server 2016, which was named DBMS of the Year in 2016 by DBengines.com.
- Seamless step-up without rewriting apps. Thanks to November’s SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1), SQL Server now has one programming surface across all editions. If you switch from Express to Standard, or Standard to Enterprise, you don’t have to rework code to take advantage of additional features. Time saved! In addition, the change brings access to innovative features across performance, security, and analytics not previously available in Express or Standard—a great reason to upgrade applications that run on those editions. The Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2016 continues to set the industry benchmark in terms of price, performance, and scalability at unparalleled TCO.
- Take back your weekend. With SQL Server 2016 you won’t have to wait for weekends or after-hours to run analytical workloads. You don’t have to wait until you can extract, transform, and load (ETL) the data to your Enterprise Data Warehouse, either. Now you can run your analytics workloads simultaneously on your operational data, without losing performance, by using in-memory OLTP tables and in-memory columnstore together. This process can provide real-time operational analytics, also known as hybrid transactional/analytics processing (HTAP). Get even more from your data with in-database advanced analytics using R statistical language, so you can model and score quickly and at scale with native integration in SQL Server’s T-SQL query language. Read all the details here.
- Unparalleled level of data security. Rest easy, you don’t need to lose sleep over potential breaches when your data is Always Encrypted—whether at rest or in motion. With SQL Server 2016 and Azure SQL Database, your database data remains encrypted at all times; at rest, during computation, and while processing queries. This is in addition to row-level security and new dynamic data-masking capabilities built-in.
- Free your users from their desks. Take a trip, work from home, or linger over lunch—Mobile BI in SQL Server 2016 has got you covered. You can get your critical business insights in rich and beautiful reports anywhere, anytime, online and offline, and on any device (IOS, Android, and Windows). Learn more about end-to-end mobile BI here.
- Upgrade without headaches. Upgrading from older versions doesn’t need to be painful. We’ve created a painless Data Migration Assistant for upgrading to SQL Server 2016 as well as Azure SQL Database. You can read all the details here, but the short version is that you can now migrate your data from an old SQL Server version to a new one, plus get help finding and fixing breaking changes from earlier versions.
Now that you’re up to speed on the benefits of SQL Server 2016, find out what’s coming next by joining us for the upcoming Data Amp online event on Wednesday, April 19, 2017. This online event begins at 8 a.m. Pacific Time and will feature keynotes by Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Group, and Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president, Microsoft Data Group, who will demonstrate how innovations in data, intelligence, and analytics are driving digital transformation. We’ll be making important announcements and showing off the latest tech that can get the most out of your data and give you a competitive edge, so you don’t want to miss it.
