Microsoft is a busy bee these days… Providing all the updates we actually want and need!
Today there was another great release for the Power BI Service.
And more importantly, a HUGE release called SQL Server 2016 2.4!
This includes a long awaited feature for SSRS and an incredible improvement for analytic workloads.
A quick overview of what you can play with:
General
- Some sad news for people with old machines: x86 server support is now deprecated!
- Smart Maintenance Plans
- Tempdb now has improved scalability
SSRS
- Export reports to PowerPoint!
- Position report parameters the way you want
- Print reports from modern browsers
- Even better support for new browsers
- Like no requirement for ActiveX to print reports
Read more details about the Reporting Services changes in this post at the official SSRS blog.
SSIS
- Excel 2013 finally made the cut as a source and destination
- Now we wait for Excel 2016 🙂
- Complex data feeds including Data Streaming destination!
- oData v4 source support in addition to oData v3
- Balanced Data Distributor
- Haven’t played with it yet, looks like it will be an improved version of this.
- AlwaysOn support
Operational Analytics and In-Memory Data Warehouse
- Updateable NonClustered Columnstore Indexes, but they no longer need an index rebuild!
- Parallel building of these NonClustered Columnstore Indexes.
- Increased speed for insert operations on delta Rowgroups
- And of course improvede query performance using these NonClustered Columnstore Indexes