SQL Server 2016 is a comprehensive high performance high scale data platform for your most demanding applications and insights on your data on any device. SQL Server 2016 seamlessly manages both relational and beyond relational (JSON, XML, Hadoop) data, seamlessly integrates structured data with Hadoop data, and seamlessly integrates on-premises data with cloud data. SQL Server 2016 is ideal for:

• Mission critical intelligent applications delivering real-time operational intelligence by combining built-in advanced analytics and in-memory technology without having to move the data or impact end user performance.
• Enterprise scale data warehousing with enhanced in-memory columnstore that increases query performance by over 100x vs disk based solutions. With SQL Server 2016, you can also access optimized MPP scale out software that can be combined with scale out appliance architecture with our Analytics Platform System (APS).
• Applications requiring the highest levels of security with new Always Encrypted technology that protects your data at rest and in motion without impacting database performance.
• Comprehensive business intelligence solutions on mobile devices with an end-to-end mobile BI solution built-in that can deliver insights on any device. You can also manage all of your KPIs, mobile reports and traditional reports from a modern web portal.
• New big data solutions that require combining relational data with non-relational data with PolyBase technology built-in that allows you to query structured and unstructured data with the simplicity of T-SQL.
• Hybrid cloud solutions that can reduce storage costs, improve high availability and simplify IT operations with new Stretch Database technology. This keeps more of your historical data at your fingertips by transparently and securely stretching warm and cold OLTP data to Microsoft Azure on-demand without application changes. In addition, faster replicas can be placed in Azure to give you cost effective disaster recovery and backups.

SQL Server 2016 owns the top TPC-E performance benchmarks  for transaction processing, the top TPC-H performance benchmarks for data warehousing, and the top performance benchmarks with leading business applications like PROS and KPMG. Customers can also gain tremendous performance improvement by simply upgrading to SQL Server 2016 without application changes (e.g. queries will run up to 34x faster). In addition to leading performance benchmarks, SQL Server 2016 also delivers top price/performance for both workloads.

• SQL Server 2016 holds two new TPC-E world record price/performance benchmarks.
• With today’s announcements, SQL Server 2016 holds #1 TPC-H 30TB   benchmark using 12TB RAM support in Windows Server 2016. This is in addition to the #1 benchmarks  for TPC-H in 10-TB  , 3-TB   and 1-TB .
• SQL Server 2016 holds top benchmarks for key industry applications (100X faster with PROS, 2.5X faster with KPMG).
• SQL Server 2016 provides tremendous performance gain upon upgrade for faster queries, faster availability and faster operations.

Today they are announcing the features in their editions, including Enterprise, Standard, and Express. With Enterprise, customers benefit from low cost of ownership with the full capabilities of SQL Server built into a single offering including their mission critical database, high performance data warehouse, rich data integration capabilities, end-to-end mobile business intelligence and built-in advanced analytics.

They also are delivering significant value to their customers with SQL Server 2016 Standard including enhanced performance with basic availability, greater scalability up to 24 cores, modern reports, tabular modeling capabilities and robust security that enables multiple layers of protection and allows you to control access to sensitive data. With Express, available as a free download, customers can build and deploy small scale database applications at no cost.

In addition to Enterprise, Standard and Express, Developer edition provides access to the full capabilities of SQL Server to build and test new mission critical, intelligent applications. In March, they announced that the SQL Server 2016 Developer edition will also be available as a free download. With Express and Developer edition, they want to make the capabilities of SQL Server 2016 broadly available to developers.