Aug 03 2018 05:41 AM
Hello,
Can someone please explain the differences between SQL Server 2012 and 2016. Is it worth it to upgrade to the 2016 version?
Thank you for your help
Aug 13 2018 08:52 AM
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.
Aug 14 2018 04:27 AM
Erratum : The first link was https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlreleaseservices/sql-server-2016-service-pack-1-sp1-released/ . Sorry for the copy-paste issue 🙂