For those who haven’t noticed already:
SQL Server 2016 CTP2 (or Preview as some call it) has just been released!
This means it is play time! 
You can either download a copy if you’re old school like me, or you can spin up a VM in Azure like all the cool kids.
SQL Server 2016 first public preview now available!
Some of my favorite features (although some are not yet in the preview):
- SSIS incremental deployment model (aka deploy only 1 package to the SSIS catalog). Although I understand the reason of the SSIS team to first allow only deployments of full projects, there are a lot of customers that want this functionality.
- Power Query in all the things! (more specifically: in SSIS and SSRS)
- R integration in SSRS (this should allow you to do amazing things with SSRS)
- SSRS revamp (still have to see it though, but I’m already excited!)
- Temporal tables
- Live query plans (seems pretty awesome)
- DAX enhancements (many 2 many, median, percentiles, and so on)
Here’s a good overview of what you can expect in SQL Server 2016:
BI on your terms with SQL Server 2016
Be careful, if you install Polybase, you apparently need the Oracle JRE. Boooo.
Anyway, a lot of goodness and I am very excited about this release.
