Why SQL 2016 rocks – the series (part 1)

SQL Server 2016 rocks! There is no doubt about it. At least not with me! I have so many cases where just by upgrading to the new engine you get performance improvement in the range of 10s of percents. And this is even before we hit general availability.

The things that are improved are so many, that for me it was really difficult and time consuming to follow everything. So I bookmarked, and bookmarked and bookmarked article after article. So in the end I end up with a huge list of things I went through or I still have to go through. And I decided – why not to share those resources. You probably have them, you probably not, but I will try to do a simple catalogue, so you can easily follow subject by subject. One note – I will mostly share articles by SQL Server CSS team or the different Program Managers, responsible for the feature development of the product. And I am sure there are a lot more articles by the community.

So let’s start. The first topic is Operational analytics which under the hood is columnstore technology allowing you now to have updatable NCCI over traditional indexes and that NCCI can even be filtered! In the last week I was able to test it over an actual data scenario (although only sample of the data in the test environment), but the results were really promising – a simple NCCI over an OLTP table of helpdesk transactions table gave of improvement of 25%. So I am excited. And here are the articles and demos if you want to further dig deep.

And there is the list:

Real-Time Operational Analytics: Simple example using nonclustered clustered columnstore index (NCCI)

Real-Time Operational Analytics: Compression Delay Option for Nonclustered Columnstore Index (NCCI)

Real-Time Operational Analytics: Filtered nonclustered columnstore index (NCCI)

Enjoy reading!