Original Professionals Microsoft Windows SQL Server 2016 Enterprise 15CAL

Original Professionals Microsoft Windows SQL Server 2016 Enterprise 15CAL

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 RTM with SQL Server 2016 Enterprise

on Windows Server 2012 R2 R2 6

Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server is a fast and dependable environment for deploying applications using the Microsoft Web Platform. Amazon EC2 enables you to run compatible Windows-based solutions on AWS' high-performance, reliable, cost-effective, cloud computing platform. Common Windows use cases include Enterprise Windows-based application hosting, website and web-service hosting, data processing, media transcoding, distributed testing, ASP.NET application hosting, and any other application requiring Windows software.

What is New in SQL Server 2016

In-memory computing performance is improved. Transactional database operationals are 30x faster, and real-time analytics and database queries are 100x faster than a classic disk-based relational databases.

SQL Server 2016 increased the data security with Always Encrypted technology which is first introduced with SQL2016. Always Encrypted secures your data both at rest and in motion, on-premises and in cloud. Database administrators use master keys for data security. On the other hand database developers are not required to change their applications after Always Encrypted security enhancement is implemented.

Advanced analytics feature built-in SQL Server 2016 increases the performance of analytics algorithms created and executed on a transactional database

Rich visualizations provide a better user experience (UX) to benefit business insights on all mobile devices including Windows, iOS, and Android.

PolyBase technology makes management of the data whether it is relational or not (non-relational data) simplier using Transact-SQL (T-SQL) for querying

Using new Stretch Database technology database administrators can move historical data transparently stretching warm and cold OLTP data to Microsoft Azure without a change in applications by developers

For backup and restore scenarios, hybrid backups on Azure and SQL Server AlwaysOn secondaries provide high availability and better disaster recovery solutions

For database engine enhancements and improvements, or to see what is new in SQL Server 2016 Database Engine, please refer to BOL article for full list improvements. For example, ALTER support for in-memory OLTP operations on memory-optimized tables is now provided by SQL Server 2016.

Row Level Security (RLS), Live Query Statistics (LQS), Query Store, Temporal Tables, support for JSON data are new features of SQL Server 2016 introduced for database administrator and T-SQL developers.

SQL Server 2016 is released in following languages in alphabetical order: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish

First bytes available to public from SQL Server 2016, the most recent version of SQL Server Data

Platform ultimate tool was released by Microsoft on 28th of May, 2015. After that day Microsoft released additional versions of SQL Server 2016 under the names of Community Technology Preview (CTP) with new enhancements after each new CTP release for database administrator and developers. Today SQL Server 2016 RTM is available for public evaluation after SQL Server 2016 Release Candidate 3 release. You can download SQL Server 2016 free trial or evaluation version.

Available forms of SQL Server 2016 

After the CTP2 release, Community Technology Preview 2.1 is available for download now. Database professionals can download 32-bit and 64-bit builds in ISO or CAB format as well as Azure installation.

SQL Server 2016 (CTP 2.3) 32-bit ISO
SQL Server 2016 (CTP 2.3) 64-bit ISO
SQL Server 2016 (CTP 2.3) 32-bit CAB
SQL Server 2016 (CTP 2.3) 64-bit CAB

Download file of SQL Server 2016 Evaluation Edition for 64-bit in English ISO format is SQLServer2016CTP2.3-x64-ENU.iso and has a download size of 2.8 GB

Operating System Requirements for SQL Server 2016 Installation

One of the dissapointing software requirement is the operating system requirement of SQL Server 2016 setup is that it does not work on Windows 7. This may force database professionals to move or upgrade their test or development database servers to Windows 8, Windows 10, or Windows Server 2012.

Here is the list of operating systems that SQL Server 2016 CTP2 (Community Technology Preview 2) is supported on:
Windows 8,
Windows 8 R2,
Windows 10,
Windows Server 2012, and
Windows Server 2012 R2

If you plan to install SQL Server 2016 on Windows 10, before you start setup please download and install Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Try to install missing .NET Framework components using turn on or off Windows 10 features program or make sure that you have an internet connection that you can install it online.

Database administrators can find step-by-step SQL Server 2016 installation guide on Windows 10 as virtual machine.

SQL Server 2016 Books Online (BOL) Help

SQL Server data professionals like administrators and SQL developers can find online help for SQL Server using the recently published Books Online for SQL Server 2016. SQL Server BOL (Books Online) provides categorized help documentation for database administrators and SQL programmers in following sections:

Database Engine,
SQL Server Data Quality Services (DQS),
SQL Server Analysis Services,
SQL Server Integration Services,
Master Data Services,
Replication, and
SQL Server Reporting Services