Microsoft announces general availability of SQL Server 2016, with deep integration of the R programming language
Microsoft today is announcing the general availability (GA) of its SQL Server database software. For more than a year now, Microsoft has been rolling out public previews …
Context & Ripple Effects
This GA closes a year-long public preview cycle and lands just three months after Microsoft committed to bringing SQL Server to Linux, making 2016 the year the database stops being a Windows-only product. The headline feature is deep R integration, which extends the R support Microsoft first shipped in its Azure Machine Learning service in early 2015 down into the database engine itself.
The strategic read: Microsoft is fusing analytics into its data platform across cloud and on-premises at the same moment it is loosening SQL Server's OS coupling — weeks later it would demonstrate SQL Server running in a Linux container on Azure.
First-order effects
- Enterprise SQL Server customers can now run R models directly against data in the database, eliminating the export-to-separate-analytics-environment step for predictive workloads.
- Microsoft gains an on-premises answer to the R capabilities it already offers in Azure Machine Learning, giving hybrid shops one analytics runtime instead of two.
Second-order effects
- When the Linux version ships commercially in 2017 as announced, the same R-enabled engine reaches non-Windows data centers, putting SQL Server in direct contention for analytics workloads at organizations that would never have evaluated it before.
- Against SAP — whose expanded partnership brings HANA onto Azure — Microsoft now pairs infrastructure coexistence with a competing in-database analytics story.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, machine-learning runtimes become a standard feature of relational databases rather than a separate toolchain, shifting vendor competition from storage performance to who hosts the model next to the data.
- Combined with the Linux port and container demos, SQL Server is being repositioned as OS-agnostic infrastructure — a structural break from its Windows-locked history that reshapes how enterprises shortlist databases.
The trend: Relational databases are absorbing machine-learning runtimes like R so analytics executes where the data lives, while Microsoft simultaneously strips SQL Server of its Windows-only constraints.