Wednesday, November 16, 2016

SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1) released

Do not expect another standard service pack that contains all hot-fixes and updates done on the previous version, this has something else, it has a major change.

Yes, in addition to fixes and new features, Microsoft makes some of previously-unavailable-features (or Enterprise-only-features) available for Standard, Web, Express and LocalDB editions. This is amazing, specially, those who run large and heavy OLTP databases and who have data warehouses implemented in Standard Edition.

Whenever I do training and consultancy on data warehousing, this biggest hit I get is client is using Standard Edition and no partitioning can be done. Not only that, unavailability of Columnstore Indexing, In-Memory OLTP are few more. This sometime discourrages the client on BI implementation as they see many limitation with the Edition they have bought and unfortunaltely they cannot go for Enterprise because of the cost. This what Microsoft has addressed with SQL Server 2016 SP1 release.


Here are the features available now with Standard, Web and Express which were not available before;



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