The Database for Mission-Critical Intelligence
Hong Kong, March 18, 2016 – Every business and nearly every industry is being transformed by technology. This disruption is driven, in part, by the convergence of three trends: a massive explosion of data, intelligence from machine learning and advanced analytics, and the economics and agility of cloud computing. The way businesses engage with their customers, run their business processes and transform their products has been reshaped. While databases power nearly every aspect of business today, they were not originally designed with this disruption in mind. Taking a giant step forward in the history of database, Microsoft announces in Hong Kong today the arrival of SQL Server 2016, the company’s latest flagship business analytics and data management platform that will be generally available later this year.
Microsoft SQL Server 2016 is a transformational technology built to help businesses rethink their data strategies with today’s challenges by powering business transformation with technology and capabilities born from the disruptions happening in cloud, data and intelligence. It was first announced by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other senior Microsoft leaders at Data Driven, a customer event in New York City on March 11th, during which Nadella shared how data insights are driving business transformation and how businesses are rethinking the way data is organized and used to drive innovation.
“We built SQL Server 2016 for this new world, and to help businesses get ahead of today’s disruptions. It supports hybrid transactional/analytical processing, advanced analytics and machine learning, mobile BI, data integration, always encrypted query processing capabilities and in-memory transactions with persistence. It is also perhaps the world’s only relational database to be “born cloud-first”, with the majority of features first deployed and tested in Azure, across 22 global data centers and billions of requests per day. It is customer tested and battle ready,” said Jack Tang, Director of Product Marketing, SQL Server at Microsoft Corporate.
Industry analysts have recognized the breadth and depth of Microsoft’s capabilities in the cloud, data and intelligence. Recently, Gartner named Microsoft as leading the industry in Operational Database Management Systems in both execution and vision. Microsoft was also recognized as a leader in Data Warehouse and Data Management Solutions for Analytics, Business Intelligence and Analytics, and as leading in vision in Advanced Analytics Platforms. On top of industry recognition from Gartner, SQL Server 2016 delivers breakthrough mission-critical capabilities in scalability, performance, and availability for customers’ most important OLTP and data warehousing workloads. It is bringing new features offering speed gains on top of many improved capabilities. These improvements and many more are all built into SQL Server and bring customers a complete platform for data management, business analytics and intelligent apps – one that can be used in a consistent way across both on-premises and the cloud. Some key improvements include:
- Most secure database. SQL Server 2016 delivers a multi-layered approach to security that enables data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory without impacting database performance. With a proven track record, SQL Server continues to be the least vulnerable database 6 years in a row, while also being the most widely-used database on the planet.
- Comprehensive business intelligence. SQL Server 2016 delivers a comprehensive, on-premises, enterprise-ready BI platform that helps you to transform complex data into actionable insights. The new SQL Server 2016 offers business intelligence for every employee on every device – including new mobile BI support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.
- In-database advanced analytics. Built-in advanced analytics provide scalability and performance for building and running your advanced analytics algorithms directly in the core SQL Server transactional database. With growing demands for predicative analytics where businesses want to proactively pave their future with data rather than react to data, SQL Server 2016 now allows businesses to accomplish this with built-in in-database advanced analytics. In addition, SQL Server 2016’s new R support enables customers to do real-time predictive analytics on both operational and analytic data.
- Consistent Experience from on-premises to cloud. SQL Server 2016 delivers a consistent experience both on-premises and on cloud with common development and management tools and common T-SQL. Leveraging on Stretch DB, businesses get an exceptional experience whether data is in your datacenter, in a private cloud, or on Azure.
Other key features include:
- In-memory database support for every workload with performance increases up to 30-100x
- Unique cloud capabilities that enable customers to deploy hybrid architectures that partition data workloads across on-premises and cloud based systems to save costs and increase agility
Microsoft Extends SQL Server to Linux Users
On the other hand, Microsoft recently announced plans to enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. SQL Server 2016 is now available on Linux in private preview and is targeting full availability for Linux users in mid-2017. Now more accessible to a broader set of users, SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solutions.
Microsoft Offers Easy Migration Plan
Microsoft also announced a new program to help more businesses move to SQL Server 2016. Businesses currently running applications or workloads on non-Microsoft paid commercial RDBMS platforms will be able to offset the costs of licensing, migration planning and training when moving to SQL Server 2016. Customers currently running applications or workloads on non-Microsoft paid commercial RDBMS platform will be able to migrate their existing applications with free SQL Server licenses[1].
[1] Software assurance required, some restrictions may apply
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About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft Hong Kong was established in 1991.
For further information, press only:
Microsoft
Jocelyn Cheung
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Email: [email protected]
Hill+Knowlton Strategies for Microsoft
Nicole Chan
Tel: (852) 2894 6207
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Oliver Kan
Tel: (852) 2894 6273
Email: [email protected]
