Microsoft is readying a first public preview of its next version of SQL Server, called SQL Server 2016, for delivery this summer.



The successor to SQL Server 2014 will include enhanced in-memory technologies, real-time operational analytics, new security and encryption technologies, built-in advanced analytics with the R language and mobile business intelligence for on-premises data, officials said this week.

SQL Server 2016 will include a new Stretch Database feature that will provide access to historical data by "dynamically stretching" warm and cold transactional data to Microsoft Azure, so that users will have an easier time getting immediate access to that data.

New Features :

Performance

Enhanced in-memory performance with upto 30xfaster transactions, more than 100x faster queries than disk based relational databases and real-time operational analytics.

Security Upgrades

Always Encrypted technology helps protect your data at rest and in motion, on-premises and in the cloud, with master keys sitting with the application, without any application changes.

High Availability
Even higher availability and performance than SQL Server 2014 with AlwaysOnsecondaries with the ability to have up to 3 synchronous replicas, DTC support and round-robin load balancing of the secondaries.

Scalability

Enhanced database caching across multiple cores & support for Windows Server 2016 that efficiently scale compute, networking and storage in both physical and virtual environments.

Access Any Data

Query relational and non-relational data with the simplicity of T-SQL with PolyBase. Manage document data with native JSON support.

Scale and Manage

Enhanced performance, scalability and usability across SQL Server Enterprise Information Management tools and Analysis Services.

Powerful Insights on any device

Business insights through rich visualizations on mobile devices. Native apps for Windows, iOS and Android. New modern reports for all browsers.

Advanced Analytics at massive scale

Built-in advanced analytics provide the scalability and performance benefits of running your “R” algorithms directly in SQL Server. Expand your analytics library with Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Breakthrough hybrid scenarios

Stretch Database technology keeps more of your customers’ historical data at your fingertips by transparently stretching your warm and cold OLTP data to Microsoft Azure on-demand without application changes.

Simplicity

New tools that make SQL Server migration to Microsoft Azure and hybrid scenarios even easier.

Consistency

Consistent experience from on-premises to Microsoft Azure IaaS & PaaS.

How-Old.net is a web application developed by Microsoft which uses facial-recognition technology to predict the age and sex of people pictured in photographs submitted to the site. Upon its release in late April 2015, the hashtag #HowOldRobot became a trending topic on Twitter as many users began tweeting about the poor accuracy of the app’s predictions.



In April 2015, Microsoft launched the site How-Old.net as a public demo for their web application “How Old,” inviting users to submit photographs for their algorithm to guess their age and sex (shown below). The site was created to promote the Azure Machine Learning Gallery collection of machine learning projects analyzing speech, facial recognition, vision and text.

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