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Microsoft introduced SQL Server 2016 to the public in two 2015 preview milestones: CTP2 on May 27 and CTP3 on October 28. The October announcement also opened public previews of Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Data Lake Analytics. SQL Server 2016 became generally available on June 1, 2016; the two Azure Data Lake services reached general availability on November 16, 2016.
What Microsoft announced in the SQL Server 2016 previews
CTP means Community Technology Preview: a pre-release build made available so customers could evaluate features and send feedback. Microsoft’s May 27, 2015 announcement called CTP2 the first public preview. It invited early adopters to download it, try it in an Azure virtual machine or their own environments, and submit feedback through Microsoft Connect.
The October 28, 2015 CTP3 announcement described a later preview with additional capabilities and a broader emphasis on analytics. The two releases were stages in the same SQL Server 2016 preview, not separate products.
CTP2: security, hybrid data, and database features
- Always Encrypted: designed to protect data at rest and in motion while keeping encryption keys in the application’s trusted environment.
- Stretch Database: could move warm and cold transactional data to Azure while retaining access through SQL Server.
- Dynamic Data Masking: added a way to limit exposure of sensitive values to users who should not see them in full.
- Native JSON support and temporal tables extended SQL Server’s ways of working with JSON data and time-based records.
- Query Data Store helped track query performance behavior, while Master Data Services and backup and restore to Azure also received improvements.
CTP3: in-memory processing and analytics
- In-memory OLTP and real-time Operational Analytics brought transaction processing and analytical workloads closer together.
- SQL Server R Services added support for R-based data science workflows within the SQL Server platform.
- PolyBase enabled federation between relational systems and Hadoop, extending the release’s data integration story.
- CTP3 also featured Always Encrypted, JSON support, and Stretch Database, capabilities already prominent in the earlier preview.
Microsoft positioned SQL Server 2016 as an on-premises and cloud database and analytics platform. The preview features therefore spanned protection, storage, transaction processing, and analytics rather than representing a single new function.
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Azure Data Lake Store versus Azure Data Lake Analytics
The two services had complementary roles: Store was the repository for data, while Analytics supplied managed processing. Microsoft described Store as an enterprise data lake built to the open HDFS standard and able to hold data of any size, type, or speed. Analytics was a managed service for distributed transformations and analysis over large datasets.
| Service | Primary role | How it worked | Preview and general availability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Azure Data Lake Store | Storage | Enterprise data lake repository built to the open HDFS standard; intended for data of varied size, type, and speed. | Public preview announced October 28, 2015; generally available November 16, 2016. |
| Azure Data Lake Analytics | Compute and analytics | Managed, massively parallel processing service. It used U-SQL and supported R, Python, and .NET; Microsoft said it required no infrastructure management, scaled on demand, and charged for resources used. | Public preview announced October 28, 2015; generally available November 16, 2016. |
Analytics was not the storage layer: it processed data held in the lake. Microsoft described its intended scale as petabytes, but that is a description of the service’s target workload, not a performance benchmark for SQL Server 2016.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.When the previews became available as products
SQL Server 2016 general availability was announced for June 1, 2016. Azure Data Lake Store and Azure Data Lake Analytics became generally available later, on November 16, 2016. Thus, the October 2015 announcement covered public previews of all three offerings, but their production availability dates differed.
The performance numbers sometimes associated with Microsoft’s 2016-era Operational Analytics announcements belong to Azure SQL Database Operational Analytics, not to the SQL Server 2016 CTP beta. Microsoft reported an example involving 75,000 transactions per second and an 11× performance gain, as well as a query-time example falling from 15 seconds to 0.26 seconds (a 57× reduction). Those are Microsoft-reported examples for that separate Azure SQL Database context, not independent comparative benchmarks of the SQL Server 2016 preview.
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