SQL Server 2019: Choose your platform and language with compatibility

In my last article on SQL Server 2019, I described how SQL Server can "save the world from transactions out of control" with Accelerated Database Recovery. SQL Server 2019 is designed to solve challenges of the modern data professional and providing choice of platform and language with compatibility is critical to any modern developer and business.

SQL Server 2017 launched our product into the world of Linux and containers. We branded the product at the time as Platform of your Choice. We opened up new possibilities for customers to run SQL Server on Windows or Linux. What many didn't know was that this choice is with compatibility. You can take a database backup on SQL Server on Windows and restore it to SQL Server on Linux with full compatibility for your tools and applications.

SQL Server 2019 extends the Linux story by offering new features previously not available including:

• Replication
• Change Data Capture
• Distributed transactions
• Machine Learning
• Polybase
• Tempdb files auto-config

SQL Server 2019 continues to enhance the story of containers with:

• The Microsoft Container Registry
• Red Hat Images
• Non-root Containers

Supporting Red Hat and Non-root is important for containers especially to be officially supported on the popular Red Hat OpenShift platform.

You will learn more about how SQL Server is capable of scale and availability with containers on Kubernetes in a future article describing SQL Server Big Data Clusters.

Developers want the language of their choice to access a data platform. SQL Server supports just about any language and provider you need. We have a very slick website for you to browse language choices and examples at https://aka.ms/sqldev.

We've heard from some developers they need the ability to extend the T-SQL language using the their preferred programming language. SQL Server 2019 introduces SQL Server Language Extensions along with the Microsoft Extensibility SDK for Java for SQL Server.

SQL Server Language Extensions use the same architecture as SQL Server Machine Learning Services called the extensibility framework.

I've shown this architecture to many people and they are hesitant to allow Java Code to be run with SQL Server. Consider these points about the architecture:

The feature must first be installed and enabled which can only be done by an administrator.

• The code can only be accessed through a T-SQL system procedure which is not available by default to all users.

The code runs in a separate, low-privileged, isolated process (not in the sqlservr process space) running on the same host as SQL Server.

Resource governor is enabled to control CPU, memory, and affinity of the "satellite processes".

SQL Server 2019 provides other capabilities for the modern data developer including:

• SQL Graph enhancements
• UTF-8 support
• Machine Learning Services enhancements

If you want more details on what's new in SQL Server 2019, check out our documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-s-new-in-sql-server-ver15. SQL Server 2019 will be generally available in the second half of calendar year 2019 and I look forward to sharing more details about SQL Server 2019 soon. Want to follow other posts and new articles where I talk more about the details behind SQL Server 2019, follow #sqlserver2019. Or follow me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/bobwardms or Twitter at @bobwardms.

You can also learn more about SQL Server 2019 in my new book SQL Server 2019 Revealed by Apress at https://aka.ms/sql2019book or on Amazon at https://amzn.to/33R8gaR.

Bob Ward, Principal Architect, Microsoft Azure Data