As you probably know by now Microsoft announced the General Availability release of SQL Server 2019 earlier this week, here's the official announcement. For me it's the most significant release of SQL Server EVER; SQL 2005 was certainly groundbreaking and the 2016 version was amazing, sure, but for me SQL 2019 is the real game changer for Data Platforms.
There's a lot of material and blog posts out there detailing the new functionality and enhancements that come in SQL 2019 (and if you haven't already, you really need to start getting up to speed) but what I wanted to do in this post was look back at a post on the SQL Server blog from back in early 2014 by the then VP of the Data Platform Group at Microsoft, Quentin Clark.
The post is titled 'What Drives Microsoft's Data Platform Vision' and I've used this article quite often when I've been outlining how we should approach the concept of a data platform. It's a very interesting read and whilst it's very focused on the Azure offerings at the time we can see how this new release shows how the data platform vision outlined in this article shaped the future of SQL Server. I'll pull out a few sub-headings and points:
"Data types are diverse", "Examples include the rise of JSON, the embracing of Hadoop by enterprises"
And (from the 2019 main page), we now have SQL Server fully embracing Hadoop:
"Manage your big data environment more easily with Big Data Clusters. They provide key elements of a data lake - Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Apache Spark..."
Grabbing another snippet:
"Analytics usage is broadening", "Deep analytics and automated techniques, like machine learning, are being used more often"
OK so whilst Machine Learning Services were introduced in SQL Server 2017 the addition of Big Data Clusters coupled with R and Python brings a whole new level of analytical capabilities inside SQL Server.
The 2014 article also mentions the concept of "Modern Transaction Processing", to quote again "data services that modern applications need are broader now than traditional RDBMS". This statement for me sums up databases in general and now SQL Server has evolved from being traditional "place to store data" shall we say to being a true hub for all of your organisations enterprise data, regardless of its form - although PolyBase came along in 2016 (when it could connect to Hadoop) it's potential has grown massively in 2019 enabling external data connections to the likes of Oracle, Teradata and MongoDB.
The 2014 article is a great read and there's so many different points in it that have shaped this release of SQL Server and now that 2019 is released and here, Microsoft's vision for the Data Platform has become a reality. Bearing in mind that figures suggest the last release of SQL Server has a high adoption rate is an encouraging sign that organisations will also embrace the potential of SQL 2019 to fully realise, and extract real value from their own Data Platforms.
