Latest advances offer businesses new ways to drive digital transformation with data, cloud, and AI on the platform of their choice
Bangkok — May 30, 2017 — Microsoft is continuing its mission to empower businesses on the digital transformation journey with the announcement of SQL Server 2017, the latest version of the world’s leading data platform. In addition to industry-leading performance, best-in-class security, and advanced analytics capabilities, SQL Server 2017 is available for the first time on Linux and Docker alongside the Windows platform, giving customers unprecedented flexibility in bringing the power of SQL Server to their preferred platforms.
“In an era of digital transformation and the Internet of Things, Microsoft’s goal is to help companies take advantage of big data, cloud, and artificial intelligence technologies to unearth new insights that may change the way people do their business – from optimizing operations with real-time analytics and accelerating decision making with accessible data insights to cutting costs with intelligent demand forecasting,” said Charn Ariyakul, Cloud & Enterprise Business Group Lead, Microsoft (Thailand) Limited. “Whether on-premises or in the cloud, we recognize cross-platform compatibility as an increasingly important factor in our customers’ diverse and rapidly changing data estates. As a result, Microsoft has developed SQL Server 2017 to run not only on Windows Server but also on open-source platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server, Ubuntu, and Docker containers on Linux or Mac.”
Now available as a Community Technical Preview, SQL Server 2017 is also bringing new intelligence capabilities to customers with the integration of AI functions into databases, data lakes, and the cloud – resulting in the first-ever relational database management system (RDBMS) with built-in AI. Furthermore, the addition of Microsoft Machine Learning Services enables Python language scripts, in addition to R, to be run directly within the database server. SQL Server can leverage NVIDIA GPU-accelerated computing through this Python/R interface to power intensive deep-learning jobs on images, text, and other unstructured data.
“A recent study by McKinsey & Company found that companies that use analytics extensively are twice as likely to outperform the competition in terms of sales, profit, growth and return on investment,” added Charn. “With SQL Server 2017, we are making data analytics available to users in real time with greater accessibility and intelligence than ever before. The deep integration of advanced analytics engines into SQL Server also strengthens our platform’s defenses against security, privacy, and compliance risks as it reduces the necessity to transfer data from one module to another.”
With this year’s edition, SQL Server is now the first major relational DBMS with built-in support for graph database, which allows businesses to harness the power of unstructured data and discover new types of relationships and insights. Through a wide range of modern connectors, SQL Server 2017 can operate seamlessly with data from many sources and deliver fast time to insights with rich data transformations and exceptional in-memory performance.
On top of these new additions, SQL Server 2017 builds further upon its track record of industry-leading performance with row-based in-memory OLTP and ColumnStore compression, which combine for real-time operational analytics. Furthermore, petabyte-scale data warehousing capabilities give SQL Server 2017 the lead in price-performance ratio in 1TB, 10TB, and 30TB TPC-H non-clustered benchmarks.
Classified at the most secure data platform with the least vulnerabilities by the US-based National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), SQL Server 2017 protects your data at rest and in motion with Always Encrypted, a feature that keeps sensitive data safe through encryption inside client applications without revealing the encryption key to the database engine. Dynamic Data Masking and Row-Level Security, meanwhile, ensure that your data is available only to those with proper authorization.
SQL Server 2017’s support for Linux also extends to newfound flexibility in HA (High Availability) architectures, allowing customers to set up Always On groups for both Linux and Windows to cover various contingency scenarios – complete with OS-level redundancy and failover. SQL Server on Linux delivers both the enterprise-grade security capabilities and price/performance leadership that Windows users enjoy.
Interested customers can discover more information and download the Community Technical Preview of SQL Server 2017 at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2017. For further inquiries, please call 02 263 6888.