SQL Server 2016 comes bundled with various data management and business intelligence tools. These include SQL Server R Services, a powerful analytics engine, and PolyBase, which allows you to access data stored on Hadoop clusters or Azure blob storage for analysis.
Scalability
Unlike many other database management systems, SQL Server runs as an operating system on the same hardware as the databases. Sitting beneath the SQL Server Database Engine, the operating system handles lower-level functions such as memory and I/O management, job scheduling, and locking of data to prevent conflicting updates.
Additionally, it supports machine learning and big data analytics applications with the help of PolyBase. It enables you to read data from external sources like Hadoop clusters and Azure blob storage using SQL queries and SQL Server R Services, an open-source R programming language distribution. SQL 2019 Standard has enhanced query processing to improve performance and added features to help meet GDPR compliance requirements. With various new features and benefits, it’s important to consider migrating from SQL Server platform 2016 to 2019 as your data architecture grows.
Powerful Analytics
The SQL Server platform is a powerful analytics engine for business intelligence and data visualization applications. It also includes built-in features to support security and compliance, including data classification, monitoring, alerts, and more. It also supports hybrid cloud by enabling organizations to leverage on-premises systems while accessing public cloud services. SQL Server 2019 improves the performance of analytics workloads by keeping memory-optimized tables and natively compiled stored procedures. It also adds resumable online index creation, UTF-8 character encoding support, and intelligent query processing.
Intelligent Query Processing is a set of behind-the-scenes enhancements that make the Query Optimizer smarter and more efficient at generating plans. It can result in up to a 10x performance boost for some queries. It also introduces lightweight query profiling, which reduces the resource overhead of gathering query runtime statistics by default. It also enables you to identify problems with questions by automatically truncating columns exceeding their storage size limits. In addition, it allows you to mark columns in your databases that contain sensitive information for additional protection.
Hybrid Cloud
Whether you decide to update to SQL Server 2019 or modernize to Azure SQL, your business will benefit from the efficiency gains of moving to the cloud. It is because moving to a modern platform like SQL Server means you can take advantage of features that improve performance, such as query interleaving and short query bias. It enables concurrent queries to share CPU resources so that slower ones do not block fast queries. It also allows for data to be consolidated in memory, which increases efficiency by decreasing network latency.
In addition, using the cloud for data storage enables organizations to reduce on-premises IT infrastructure costs. For example, a company could set up rules to automatically move accounting files to the cloud to save on-site storage space. The primary benefits of hybrid cloud architecture are scalability and cost savings. The ability to respond to IT demands flexibly is a major advantage for businesses that want to make the most of digital transformation. This flexibility is a major selling point for CIOs and other IT leaders looking to improve business agility.
Artificial Intelligence
With SQL Server 2019, you can leverage new artificial intelligence capabilities. Large amounts of data can be managed more easily and analyzed quickly and accurately because of these advantages. They also help you use advanced analytics tools like Power BI and Azure Machine Learning.
Moreover, it has better compliance certifications. It helps businesses meet their compliance needs, which is important for avoiding fines and lost customer trust. Additionally, it can help them cut costs and refocus workforce efforts from maintenance to more productive work. Users must repair their MDF data file during the initial phase and create a backup. Once done, they can use the SSMS to import/export the backed-up data files. After the entire process, they can say their database migration is complete.
Performance
SQL Server 2019 features several performance enhancements. Its Intelligent Query Processing feature is a behind-the-scenes set of changes that can give you up to 10x faster performance for some queries without changing the code. Another new feature is automatic tuning, which helps you identify and fix your database’s performance problems. Also, it introduces a new level of granularity for locking on tables and indexes to allow multiple concurrent users to access the data simultaneously without blocking one another. The feature can be enabled per database by enabling DBCC OPTIONS(TABLE/PAGE, LIMIT), and SQL Server will use latches or spinlocks to implement this new level of mutual exclusion. The feature improves disaster recovery and high availability solutions with a new ability to roll back or recover a database instantly. It also supports reading from external data sources through PolyBase, which enables SQL Server to read data from Hadoop clusters or Azure blob storage using SQL queries. Furthermore, it provides memory-optimized TempDB metadata to eliminate bottlenecks for TempDB-heavy workloads. It also offers improved column store index build, rebuilds, and static data masking.
