SQL Server 2019 is Microsoft’s flagship OLTP database solution. The latest version, SQL Server 2019 (15.x), builds on previous releases, introducing a range of new features that, when used in the right way, could help you rise above the competition.
Primarily, this latest release is focused on big data, allowing your organisation to bring together its databases, data lakes and data sources into one solution. This includes a complete Artificial Intelligence platform for your workloads to increase your uptime and reduce your operations and maintenance workloads.
SQL Server 2019 also gives your developers more choice, compared to previous versions, in terms of the languages, types of data, operating systems and environments they can use.
In this post, we will highlight the major benefits SQL Server 2019 can bring to your organisation, before explaining these new features in a little more detail.
Standout Benefits of SQL Server 2019
SQL Server 2019 pushes the big data boundaries of what your organisation can achieve, and also enables frequent rollouts to seamlessly get your solutions to market.
#1 Unleash your Big Data
SQL Server 2019 brings massive improvements to help organisations unlock their siloed data through the provision of its new Big Data Clusters (BDC) feature.
As a result, you can query data from multiple sources, in any format and then capitalise on it using a range of in-built analysis features. You can also query external data sources, without moving or copying that data, while implementing AI and machine learning features to gain further valuable insights into your data.
#2 Eradicate Data Duplication with Virtualisation
SQL Server 2019’s advanced data virtualisation capabilities overcome many of the data duplication issues facing today’s IT teams.
Data can be accessed in its original location, without the need for duplication. Also, you won’t waste time ingesting, transforming and analysing your information from multiple sources.
#3 Save Time Thanks to Kubernetes
You can expedite your deployment times thanks to SQL Server 2019 and its Kubernetes features. With Kubernetes, everything is deployed as an image, so everything is preconfigured. So, the process of deployment is significantly simplified and streamlined.
This not only reduces risk and provides consistency across all of your environments, but also leads to significant time savings as you can deploy SQL Server 2019 with a couple of clicks. So, you can implement multiple changes every day. What’s more, containerisation also allows you to seamlessly test and roll out these changes, further reducing your development lifecycles.
New and Upgraded Features
Here are some of the standout features of SQL Server 2019. For more technical information, please refer to the SQL Server 2019 (15.x) release notes.
#1 Data virtualisation and Big Data Clusters
Data is the new corporate currency – a fact which SQL Server is fully aware of as it focuses on creating seamless data virtualisation and through the provision of its new Big Data Clusters (BDC) service.
First, SQL Server 2019 provides full-on data virtualisation using PolyBase. While PolyBase can still connect to Azure storage and Hadoop servers, it also allows you to access and combine both your relational and non-relational data within SQL Server. As a result, you can query data from your external sources, including SQL Server, Teradata, Oracle, MongoDB, and other ODBC data sources with external tables.
Second, SQL Server 2019 combines its Linux/container compatibility with Kubernetes to provide a new, scalable big data solution called Big Data Clusters (BDC). Because BDC implements a Kubernetes-based implementation of SQL Server, this means you can deploy scalable clusters of Apache Spark and HDFS containers.
Thanks to these two features, you can massively streamline many data-based tasks, providing you with a single platform that can take your OTLP, data lake and machine learning requirements. What’s more, this solution is available both on-premise and in the cloud.
#2 Intelligent databases
SQL Server 2019 introduces a range of “Intelligent Database” features. This provide out-of-the-box solutions with no application changes, including:
- Intelligent Query Processing - which is a smart solution, providing SQL Server with the ability to allocate more resources during query processing.
- SQL Server’s TempDB – which can now be configured as a memory-optimised data to improve performance.
SQL Server 2019 also builds on previous releases to reduce resource bottlenecks. For example, SQL Server’s query optimizer can provide predictable performance across all of your workloads, automatically allocating more resources when needed. According to Microsoft, all of these measures can help your SQL Servers “just run faster”.
#3 Language availability
SQL Server 2019 comes with UTF-8 encoding support. This is an important feature, which has long been requested by organisations that want to extend their business on a global scale.
UTF-8 support means you can provide multilingual database applications, tailored to specific market regulations, and still run your legacy applications around the world.
That’s not all. There’s also a new extensibility framework, which allows your developers to use the language of their choice to gain insights across your data. A range of language extensions are also available. So, your developers can now write Java code, and use R and Python to code machine learning services on Linux, for example.
#4 Security and availability
A range of mission-critical security upgrades are available in SQL Server 2019, including to its encryption, certificate management and audit features.
In particular, a new feature called Always Encrypted with secure enclaves extends SQL Server’s existing Always Encrypted feature, allowing computations on plaintext data inside a secure enclave on the server side. The Transparent Data Encryption feature is also now available in the Standard Edition.
There is a renewed focus on increased availability, with SQL Server 2019 introducing many new features and enhancements in this area. This includes the Accelerated Database Recovery feature, which allows your database to recover quickly during severe disruptions, such as power outages, which may affect your long-running transactions. What’s more, SQL Server 2019 also increases the maximum number of synchronous replicas to five for automatic failover in one group.
What next?
The latest version of SQL Server 2019 brings a range of benefits to businesses, helping you unlock the value of your big data with its out-of-the-box solutions and cross-platform compatibility.
If you’d like to find out more about SQL Server 2019 and how we can help you utilise this technology, please click here.
