SQL Server 2016 CTP3 – new features and the JSON support improvements

SQL Server Community Technology Preview 3 has been released some days ago.

The SQL Server team added a lot of features related to:

• SQL Server Engine (Query Store, Temporal Tables and In-Memory improvements)
• Cloud-ready stuff (Transactional replication from and to Azure SQL Databases, Stretched database enhancements)
• New releases of Management Studio
• Analysis Services
• Reporting Services (great, let’s say, “new entry”)
• Integration Services
• …

Additionally, we can deal with new programmability features:

DROP IF EXISTS (finally, after many MVP communiry requests), MAXDOP on DBCC statements, sp_set_session_context for creating a session context as a set of key value pairs, and much more.

I’m a fan of the SQL Server 2016 native JSON support right now. This is one of the newest features, and, due to this, it’s a “frequent changing” topic. The CTP3 has been released before our SQL Saturday in Parma, fortunately. Thus, I have to update my slides and demo in three weeks. This is great!

This is the “what’s new” on CTP3 for JSON support:

• OPENJSON() function
• ISJSON() function
• JSON_VALUE() function
• JSON_QUERY() function

I’ll write a blog post for each one of those function in the next days. So we will be ready for #sqlsat462!

Stay tuned! 🙂