Hi,
Well, yes there's Indeed many new features and enhacements from SQL 2012 to SQL 2016 (I would say SQL 2017 as well). There's sooo much to tell, there's so a looot a new features that I don't know where to begin :)
- First, Edition requirements : since SQL 2016 SP1, a lot of features previously only available on Enterprise Edition are now available on Standard Edition. And that will impact inevitably and positively your costs. Ref : https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/psssql/2016/02/23/sql-2016-it-just-runs-faster-announcement/
- Performance : Since SQL 2014, we have improvements on the SQL Engine, especially on the SQL Optimizer (Ref. New Cardinality Estimation).
- Performance again : We know have In-Memory objets, compiled stored procedures, and updatable columnstore indexes. And the impact on performance is impressive. It's huge, it's massive ! Abviously this tuning requires a couple of skills on these topics, but you can expect a gain of performance about X20-X30 depending on the scenario. (Ref : https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/psssql/2016/02/23/sql-2016-it-just-runs-faster-announcement/ ).
- Finally : I can't be exhaustive here in only a couple of words to explain you all the différences from SQL 2012 to SQL 2016. There's so much to tell. I could also spend time to talk about high availability (AlwaysOn enhancements), security (AlwaysEncrypted, Row Security Level..), technology embedment (R language, JSON, Polybase HDFS..), and obviously a galaxy of things on the Azure Cloud
For details get a look here : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-2016?view=sql-server-2017 .
In conclusion, yes you can directly upgrade your databases from SQL 2012 to SQL 2017. During your migration process, do not forget to :
- Perform a DBCC CheckDB about your data integrity
- Perform a database backup to prevent human errors.
- Update your statistics
- Upgrade your database compatibility level.
Hope this helps.
Fred.M.
