Nutanix-WPslide2

As we look at the SQL Server platform over the past few years, it becomes clear that SQL Server 2016 is one of the biggest leaps forward in the Microsoft data platform. SQL 2016 gives admins and the business real time insights across your transactional and analytical data with a scalable database platform that has every-thing built in. This means leveraging in-memory performance, new security innovations and high availability. Also, organiza-tions are able to utilize advanced analytics that help make mis-sion-critical applications intelligent.

Beyond some of the big updates, there are a few core features to keep an eye on:

Polybase. Microsoft had introduced Polybase, a SQL Server connector to Hadoop (and Azure Blob Stor-age) to its data warehouse appliance, Analytics Plat-form System, in 2015. But now Microsoft has incorpo-rated that functionality into the regular on-premises product. This feature will benefit you if your regular data processing involves dealing with a lot of large text files – they can be stored in Azure Blob Storage or Hadoop, and queried as if they were database tables. It’s important to work with a virtualization and data center solution that can support this type of extension, a great area where HCI can help.