The next version of formerly known SQL Server, RDBMS is out now as SQL Server 2017 Community Technology Preview 2.0. The CTP was announced by way of the company's online Microsoft Data Amp 2017 event hosted by Microsoft Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, which can be viewed here on demand.

The new SQL Server 2017 Community Technology Preview 2.0 is reportedly the first production-quality preview of the upcoming offering, available for both Windows and Linux.

The SQL Server team stated in a blog post, “In this preview, we added a number of new capabilities, which include the ability to run advanced analytics using Python in a parallelized and highly scalable way, the ability to store and analyze graph data, and other capabilities that help you manage SQL Server for high performance and uptime, including the Adaptive Query Processing family of intelligent database features and online indexing that can be resumed" 

Some of those capabilities are now available on Linux for the first time that were provided to Windows-only in the past, include:

Extra SQL Server Agent capabilities, SQL Server Agents can be used to keep copies of data in synchronization with log shipping.

Listener for Always On availability groups -- The listener enables clients to connect to the primary replica in an availability group, monitoring availability and directing connections to the replicas.

The data developers are likely to be interested in the new ability to use the Python programming language within the database for analytics in order to enhance machine learning, predictive analytics and data science scripts, on the Windows side of things.

Microsoft stated that the new feature, enables Python scripts to be run directly within the database server, or to be embedded into T-SQL scripts, where they can be easily deployed to the database as stored procedures and easily called from SQL client applications by stored procedure call, called Microsoft Machine Learning Services.

"SQL Server 2017 will be able to extend Python's performance and scale by providing a selection of parallelized algorithms that accelerate data transforms, statistical tests and analytics algorithms. This functionality and the ability to run R in-database and at scale are only available on Windows Server operating system at this time."

A complete list of new features in CTP 2.0 2017 is given below: 

1. Added support for Graph Data to model many-to-many relationship, with Nodes and Edges Table types.

2. Now, Resumable online index rebuild, allows you to resume an online index rebuild operation from where it stopped after a failure. You can also pause and later resume an online index rebuild operation.

3. Batch Mode Adaptive Join to improve plan quality.

4. IDENTITY_CACHE option for ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION, to avoid  gaps in the values of identity columns in case a server restarts unexpectedly or fails over to a secondary server.

5. SQL Server Machine Learning Services (till now, SQL Server R Services), added support for the Python language with existing ‘R’.

6. Interleaved Execution for multi-statement T-SQL TVFs to improve plan quality.

7. Run the Python language in-database to scale and accelerate machine learning, predictive analytics and data science scripts. 

8. Adaptive Query Processing, for automatically running database queries efficiently.

9. And for SQL Server with Linux:

    – Additional SQL Server Agent capabilities

    – Listener for Always On availability groups

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