I’ve been reading up on some of the new features for SQL Server 2017 in the Community Technical Preview list. Right now I’m liking what I see a lot. Most of the modifications are addressing issues I have personally experienced.
There have been times when I could have used the new Resumable online index rebuilding feature. This feature essentially allows you to pause and resume rebuilding of indexes. There may be any number of reasons to pause the index rebuild, such as your maintenance window has expired. The engine may also stop a rebuild for other reasons such as insufficient disk space. Later on you can pick up where you left off, instead of having to completely start over. That’s really cool.
I like the graph capabilities being added. The mining queries for graphs and vectors is really growing. It will be interesting to see how this integrates with the new CosmosDB features in Azure. In SQL Server you will be able to create node and edge tables with less traditional database designs for many to many relationships.
SELECT INTO has been one of my favorite commands for a long time, because it did not require transactions in the old days, so it was really fast. I don’t know if that is still the case, but old habits die hard. However, you can use SELECT INTO to create tables in more than TempDb. You can SELECT INTO a new table in your active database, or any database you can connect, and have the necessary privileges. Microsoft has made this even better. Now you can also specify the file group where you want the new table to be placed. I think that’s really cool.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I did a short Google search and came across https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/configure-windows/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2017-database-engine should you wish to check this out yourself.
Cheers,
Ben