Microsoft’s relationship with open sources strengthens as it announces SQL Server on Linux

Ahead of its Data-Driven event in New York on Thursday, March 7, 2016, Microsoft announced it is kicking off a wave of “launch activities for SQL Server 2016” that will be followed by general availability coming later this year for most.

SQL Server customers can look forward to:

• Groundbreaking security encryption capabilities that enable data to always be encrypted at rest, in motion and in-memory to deliver maximum security protection
• In-memory database support for every workload with performance increases up to 30-100x
• Incredible Data Warehousing performance with the #1, #2 and #3 TPC-H 10 Terabyte benchmarks for non-clustered performance, and the #1 SAP SD Two-Tier performance benchmark on Windows
• Business Intelligence for every employee on every device – including new mobile BI support for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices
• Advanced analytics using our new R support that enables customers to do real-time predictive analytics on both operational and analytic data
• Unique cloud capabilities that enable customers to deploy hybrid architectures that partition data workloads across on-premises and cloud based systems to save costs and increase agility

Perhaps, more impressive is Microsoft’s bundling the announcement of extending SQL Server to Linux. On the Official Microsoft Blog, the company sort of buries the lead half down its announcements list that it has plans to bring SQL Server to Linux.

SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations – like Stretch Database which lets customers access their data on-premises and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost – all built in.”

According to Microsoft, the plan is to put its core relational database capabilities up for preview as early as today March 7, 2016, and work tirelessly on hitting a general availability target of “mid-2017.”

For more information on SQL Server 2016 and the extension of SQL Server on Linux, Microsoft encourages fans to keep an eye and ear peeled to its Data Driven event on Thursday, or sign up for regular updates and news provided by the team here.