Are You Excited to Know What is New in SQL Server 2017?
Nowadays a large range of users is moving towards the latest versions due to its various advanced services. However, Microsoft provides most interesting and new features that bring the latest release of SQL Server. While the SQL Server 2017 does not have detailed features of SQL Server 2016 but still, some new features will be added in it. Reason being that, the development cycle of SQL Server 2017 is extremely small than the SQL Server 2016 development cycle. One of the major advantages is SQL Server 2017 works on both Windows and Linux operating systems. In the following section, we are going to discuss What is new in SQL Server 2017 and much more details.
New Features in SQL Server 2017
With the next release of SQL Server there are lots of interesting new features as given below:
Python & Machine Learning
Most of the users have searched the built-in support for executing the Python commands. However, one of the major new features of SQL 2016 Server was an integration of R, an open source programming language, into Microsoft SQL Server database engine. Even the users can use the stored procedure (sp_execute_external_script) for running the R code that can take advantage of parallelism in the database engine. Microsoft programmed the stored procedures to be open-ended, and then, supports to add Python as the second language. Python combines the script with a great readability and also used by IT admins, data scientists, developers, and data analysts. In addition, Python allows to easily leverage an external statistical package to perform basic data manipulation and statistical analysis. When the users combine this capability with Transact-SQL, the result becomes powerful.
Adaptive Query Processing (AQP)
When Python is likely to dominate the headlines, at least for the analytics crowd, the powerful new capability has been added to optimize the SQL Server queries. At the past, SQL Server can rely on the index and column statistics to consider the features of query execution, like multiple operations and different physical join operators. There was a lot of guesswork here, even that perfect statistics, SQL Server has no knowledge of correlations between two columns in the specific query. The SQL Server engine supports adaptive query processing, ability to meet the users need. In other terms, results of the query optimizer can alter later steps within the plan, probably better. Some plans are cached plans, notable the actually granted memory for execution of the query, can modify the result of SQL Server from an existing execution. The modified cached plan performs better result as compared to the created plan when the query gets executed first.
Supports the Graph Database
The major feature of SQL Server 2017 is a graph data within a core database engine. For this context, the term ‘graph’ is used in the mathematical context, defined as a set of vertices that connect to all the nodes. In latest years, graph data has been collected because of the natural social media. Graph data from which most of the people are actually connected. Social media has to rely on the graph data and the SQL Server provides a direct support for graph data, a number of new applications will develop rapidly. In the traditional relational database, graph data has the capability to model ‘many-to-many’ relationship.
SQL Server has provided two different kinds of tables, named as NODE and EDGE are exactly as their names imply. A node is marked in CREATE TABLE statement can cause the SQL Server to create a NodeID for each row automatically. The EDGE storage is very simple, which records the direct connection between two nodes. There are multiple node tables as needed to describe all the entities in the data model, and creates an individual edge table for connecting such data entities.
Final Words
Being updated is more important in the technological arena just like in case of SQL server. However, we understand the main concern of the users, therefore, we have already discussed many of the new features of SQL Server 2017 in complete details. If you have any issue related to the SQL 2017 new features then, feel free to contact us.