No Longer Just An OLTP Database

SQL Server 2016 is being called the biggest leap forward in databases releases to date. That’s a pretty bold statement, but we kind of have to agree with it. Mostly due to the fact that Microsoft has built everything in to this release, whereas its competitors either sell them as separate add-on SKUs or they don’t even have them available to buy yet.

So, in this five part blog series, we will examine the five key messages that differentiate SQL Server 2016 from its competitors:

• Industry Leader in Mission Critical OLTP
• Most Secure Database
• Highest Performing Data Warehouse
• End-to-End Mobile BI on any device
• In-database Advanced Analytics

 We’ll start with Industry Leader in Mission Critical OLTP:

If you look back at SQL Server 2005, it was for basic OLTP, and people used it primarily for departmental workloads. It had some reporting but that was about it. SQL Server today has expanded in a big way: It’s a market leading mission critical OLTP database.

Here’s a brief look into why:

If you are using the traditional OLTP model, you probably aren’t doing reporting against your transactional OLTP database for fraud detection, because you don’t want to impact your customer’s experience. For example, you don’t want to ask your customer at a retail counter to wait five minutes to process his credit card because you are trying to do reporting against that primary database. Instead, you are likely doing an ETL job to a data warehouse and then do reporting against the data warehouse. This can take anywhere from two hours to 24 hours. That is clearly not real-time.

We can solve that problem for you with the capabilities 2016 delivers. We can accelerate the transactions up to 30 times. On top of that, you can also run in-memory columnstore index which is superfast. How fast is superfast, you ask? So fast that some of our customers have improved queries speeds by 100x faster. By bringing these two engines together, running in-memory columnstore on top of the in-memory OLTP engine, customers can enable real-time reporting against their operational database without impacting end customer performance.

That’s the key. SQL Server 2016 enables real-time operational analytics without impacting the transactional database performance.

This is a major differentiation point from Oracle because in order for this to work for Oracle, they would need Times Ten to work with the in-memory column engine they have in Oracle 12-C. But they don’t work together.

Just consider all the real-time business problems you can solve with this technology!

Next time in this blog series we’ll look deeper into the security offered in SQL Server 2016.