Microsoft announces general availability of
SQL Server 2016. It is said to be world’s fastest and most expensive preformant database for HTAP (Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing) with updateable in-memory columnstores along with advanced analytics through deep integration with R Services.
Microsoft in its official blog states, “Software applications can now deploy sophisticated analytics and machine learning models in the database resulting in 100x or more speedup in time to insight, compared to deployments of such models outside of the database.”
Fresh platform for intelligent application
Microsoft states, “The integration of advanced analytics into a transactional database is revolutionary. Today a majority of advanced analytic applications use a primitive approach of moving data from databases into the application tier to derive intelligence. This approach incurs high latency because of data movement, doesn’t scale as data volumes grow and burdens the application tier with the task of managing and maintaining analytical models. And deep analytics on real-time transactions are next to impossible without a lot of heavy lifting.”
SQL Server 2016 helps in simplifying analytics in the similar way in which databases simplifies enterprise data management, which is by moving the analytics closer to where the data is managed. It introduces a complete new paradigm where all joins, aggregation and machine learning are securely performed within the database itself without required to move the data out, hence enabling analytics on real-time transactions with more speed and parallelism. Hence, it results in analytical applications, which can be simpler and need only query the database for analytic results. You will now be able to update machine learning models, deploy new models and also monitor their performance in the database, without having to recompiling and redeploying the applications. Moreover, the data will now be able to serve as a central server for enterprise’s analytical models along with multiple intelligent applications which can leverage the same model.
The SQL Server 2016 comes with numerous features and tools so as to support cross-platform analytics. Polybase will allow you to run queries on external data in Hadoop or Azure blob storage. It can also push computation to Hadoop so that the analytical application will be able to join and also intergrate data from big data stores with the data in the relational store.
Microsoft states, “SQL Server 2016 has ground-breaking performance optimizations and efficiencies, leading to new levels of performance and scale. Modern servers can support a large number of cores with sophisticated vector instructions, can hold terabytes of memory, and provide very high I/O bandwidth with local flash storage. Optimizing for the concurrency and parallelism inherent within such servers can provide dramatic speedups at scale, and often outperform large distributed databases.”