Today, at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Microsoft is announcing the general availability of a new version of its flagship operational database, SQL Server 2017.This new version of SQL Server adds new features from the worlds of data science and NoSQL. It offers cross-platform capabilities and Dockercontainer compatibility.
But it also reinforces its investment in core database engine performance, ease of index maintenance, high availability and data warehouse performance. That’s a difficult balance and one that other database vendors don’t have to meet. While this may be Microsoft’s cross to bear, the company does pretty well with it, turning a formidable challenge into a positive market differentiator.
The release of SQL Server 2017 heralds SQL Server’s return to the *NIX platform, with a new Linux version of the product. And despite this development being legacy-consistent (early versions of SQL Server, co-developed with Sybase, also ran on UNIX), it is still a very big deal.
