Microsoft announced earlier today the release of SQL Server 2016 SP1, now this would not normally stir up a lot of noise in the community, however with the release of this service pack, the SQL Server landscape has changed. By downloading and applying this service pack on your SQL Server 2016 environment, regardless of the edition you are running (Enterprise, Standard, Express, Web, LocalDB) there are now even more features available across the editions.
“Key Improvements allowing a consistent programmability surface area for developers and organizations”
Microsoft are now making it easier for you to build complex/advanced applications in your organisation regardless of the edition you have. Enterprise Edition is still the optimal edition with all of the bells and whistles, but this is a massive step towards big and better applications running on SQL Server keeping up with the ever changing landscape of business requirements.
So what do we get in our non Enterprise environments when we apply SQL Server 2016 SP1?
| Feature | Standard | Web | Express | LocalDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Always Encrypted | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Change Data Capture | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Compression | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Database Snapshot | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Dynamic Data Masking | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fine grained auditing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| In-memory Columnstore | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| In-memory OLTP | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Multiple filestream containers | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Partitioning | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PolyBase | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Row-level Security | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
The table above outlines a number of features that are now available in non Enterprise Edition configurations, there are still a number of Enterprise Only features but this is a massive step forward and a great reason if you are not on SQL Server 2016, to really think about migrating to SQL Server 2016. For a full breakdown of have a look at the SQL Server 2016 SP1 editions datasheet.
Apart from lighting up these features that previously were available in Enterprise Edition, SP1 does have the usual fixes and updates that we need to apply to our environments to ensure that they stay stable.
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