It’s official: the next version of SQL Server, planned to be released this year, will be called SQL Server 2017. It is currently in the Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2.0 stage which is the first production-quality preview of the product.

Even though it’s coming just a year after SQL 2016, it’s bringing some game-changing features. Here are the highlights:

1. It runs on Windows, Linux and Docker containers! In other words – it can run on any platform including Mac OS. And we are talking about the identical functionality of the database engine on all those platforms, not 3 different versions.
2. It brings Adaptive Query Processing automatically executing database queries as efficiently as possible through batch mode memory grants, adaptive joins and interleaved execution.
3. Graph Data processing – going beyond traditional relational databases supporting nodes and edges, multi-hop navigation and join-free pattern matching.
4. Python support! With R introduced in SQL 2016, this allows using both popular languages for machine learning and data science WITHIN the SQL Server! This makes SQL Server the first and only RDMS with built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

There will be a lot of blog posts about this in coming weeks. Until then:

• Watch Microsoft VPs announcing SQL Server 2017
• Read the official MS blog
• Download and test the New SQL Server 2017 for Windows
• Test SQL 2017 on Linux or Docker
• Test SQL 2017 in an Azure Virtual Machine
• Sign up for the monthly SQL Server Town Hall