SQL Server 2019 was first announced at the Microsoft Ignite Conference in November 2018, and that was when the first CTP, or Community Technology Preview, was released to the public. Here we are a year later, and as many expected, the official release date was November 4, 2019 which happened to be when the Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference began, and Microsoft publicly launched both SQL Server 2019 and a brand-new SQL “IoT” 2019 edition.
Product Summary
SQL Server 2019 builds on the strength of previous releases. SQL Server has evolved from a departmental database in 2008 R2 to a mission-critical, industry-leading database. In recent releases, Microsoft added in-memory performance, innovative security features, end-to-end mobile intelligence, built-in artificial intelligence (AI), and a choice of OS, including Linux. With the release of SQL Server 2019, Microsoft has invested heavily in big data analytics by bringing Apache Spark and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) into SQL Server as a single, integrated solution.
SQL Server 2019 builds on the innovation and market of SQL Server 2017
- Intelligence over any data – Intelligence over any data. AI and machine learning overall data with the power of SQL and Apache Spark.
- Data virtualization using Polybase – Integrates data from many sources, including Oracle, Teradata, Mongo, and Hadoop, without movement or replication.
- Choice of platform and language – Supports both Linux and Docker containers while adding significant investments in enabling connectivity to a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, Python, Ruby, and Node.js.
- Industry-leading performance – As a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems, SQL Server is recognized as having leading performance across a number of online transaction processes and data warehousing TPC benchmarks, enabled by innovative new features such as intelligence query processing.
- Most secure over the past nine years – According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, SQL Server has had the fewest number of vulnerabilities over the past eight years. This is important because even though these vulnerabilities are eventually patched, there is a point where customers’ data is left exposed for a length of time, as was the case with Equifax.
Per SQL website, it is rated as least vulnerable over the last nine years. - Insights in minutes and rich reports – Power BI report server combines the best of the born-in-the-cloud Power BI with the SQL Server Reporting Services, giving your users access to rich, interactive reports and the enterprise reporting capabilities of SQL Server Reporting Services. You can confidently scale to thousands of users because Power BI Report Server is based on a proven, enterprise-grade platform.
What benefits are available with the new IoT 2019 edition?
In the comparison chart down below, I’ve highlighted a few of the top IoT changes with this new 2019 edition.
- Intelligent Query Processing – Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) is a feature that improves the performance of existing workloads with minimal implementation effort to adopt. Several new features have been added in SQL 2019 including Row mode memory grant feedback, Batch mode on rowstore, and Table variable deferred compilation. See SQL upcoming features and enhancements.
- Accelerated database recovery – Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) is a new SQL database engine feature that greatly improves database availability, especially in the presence of long-running transactions, by redesigning the SQL database engine recovery process. ADR is currently available for single databases and pooled databases in Azure SQL Database, and databases in Azure SQL Data Warehouse (currently in public preview). The primary benefits of ADR are fast and consistent database recovery, instantaneous transaction rollback, aggressive log truncation.
- In-Memory Database: Persistent Memory support – SQL Server 2019 (15.x) adds support for Persistent Memory (PMEM) devices to Linux, providing full enlightenment of data and transaction log files placed on persistent memory.
- Always Encrypted with secure enclaves – Introduced in SQL Server 2016, Always Encrypted protects the confidentiality of sensitive data from malware and high-privileged unauthorized users of SQL Server. Always Encrypted with secure enclaves addresses certain limitations related to functionality on encrypted columns inside the database by allowing computations on plaintext data inside a secure enclave on the server side.
- Free supported Java; Native UTF-8 support – Microsoft provides a Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver for use with SQL Server, and Azure SQL Database. The driver is available at no additional charge and provides Java database connectivity from any Java application, application server, or Java-enabled applet. This driver is a Type 4 JDBC driver that provides database connectivity through the standard JDBC application program interfaces (APIs). SQL Server 2019 (15.x) introduces full support for the widely used UTF-8 character encoding as an import or export encoding, and as database-level or column-level collation for string data.
- Data classification & auditing – Data Discovery & Classification introduces a new tool built into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for discovering, classifying, labeling & reporting the sensitive data in your databases.
- SQL Server Analysis Services Direct Query – Installed as an on-premises server instance, SQL Server Analysis Services supports tabular models at all compatibility levels (depending on version), multidimensional models, data mining, and Power Pivot for SharePoint. By default, tabular models use an in-memory cache to store and query data. When tabular models query data residing in-memory, even complex queries can be incredibly fast. However, there are some limitations to using cached data. Namely, large data sets can exceed available memory, and data freshness requirements can be difficult if not impossible to achieve on a regular processing schedule. DirectQuery overcomes these limitations while also leveraging RDBMS features making query execution more efficient.
Whether your scenario is On-Prem, Hybrid or Cloud, Arrow has a SQL product to support your solution.
Arrow and Microsoft can provide a SQL database option for Windows, Linux as well as on-prem, hybrid and SQL on Azure in the cloud via CSP. Your IoT solution might require a combination hybrid configuration enabling your IoT devices to communicate to an on-prem SQL database. Or, you might need the data sent to the Azure cloud for analytics and reporting services. Work with us to configure your solution.
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SKU Lineup
For customers ready to test SQL IoT 2019 who need assistance, including information on the different editions and licensing, please contact us and we’ll get you moving to the Ultimate Database.
