Do you want to know SQL Server 2019 features? You are on the right page to check the features of Microsoft SQL Server 2019.

SQL Server 2019 New Features

Below are Microsoft SQL Server’s top 8 features. Let’s discuss each feature in-depth to learn more.

sql server 2019 highlights — New Features of SQL Server 2019

Big Data Clusters
UTF-8 Support
Intelligent Query Processing
Resumable Online Index Create
Machine Learning on Linux
Always on Availability groups
New Feature of SQL Server on Linux
Security.

Table of Contents

Big Data Clusters

A recent addition to the SQL Server 2019 features release is big data clusters. This feature allows you to simultaneously deploy multiple scalable clusters of HDFS, Spark, and SQL Server containers running on Kubernetes.

This Big data runs parallelly, and we can read, write, and process big data from Transact SQL to Spark. It allows us to combine easily and analyze high-value relational data with high volume big data.

Features of Big Data Cluster

Data virtualization – By eliminating the need to move or copy data to make a query, SQL Server PolyBase has made it easier to query external data sources for SQL Server big data clusters. The SQL Server 2019 preview has introduced new connectors to the data sources.

Data Lake – The big data cluster makes an expandable HDFS storage pool possible, which effectively improves big data storage from external sources.

Integrated AI and Machine Learning – The big data cluster enables Artificial intelligence and machine learning to be applied to the data, which will be stored in several HDFS [Hadoop Distributed file system] data pools and storage pools. Several built-in AI tools, such as R, Python, Scala, and Java, are available in SQL Server.

Management and Monitoring – The cluster administrator portal is a website that shows the health and status of the cluster’s pods and provides links to additional dashboards for log analytics and monitoring.

Advantages of Big Data Cluster

Includes pre-built snippets for common management duties.
Permits uploading, previewing, creating directories, and browsing HDFS.
Facilitates the creation, access, and use of notebooks compatible with Jupyter.
The Data Virtualization Wizard has made it easier to create external data sources.
The entire group infrastructure can be set up more quickly when a big data cluster and K8 infrastructure are combined.
The big data clusters handle all security issues that arise from integrating the relational environment with big data.
Data integration is made simple by data virtualization, which eliminates the need for ETL (extract, transform, and load).

UTF-8 Support

The widely used UTF-8 data encoding standard is supported by the brand-new SQL Server 2019. Data export, import, database-level, and column-level data collation all use the UTF-8 character encoding. When creating or modifying the object collation type to object collation with UTF-8, it is enabled. Both char and varchar data types are supported.

There are two main reasons why data needs to be encoded both during storage and during retrieval.

To reduce storage space or memory usage.
To protect important data with data security.

Earlier versions of SQL Server did not support the UTF-8 format; instead, they used alternative encoding methods like UCS-2. However, SQL Server 7.0 was the only version to introduce Unicode encoding.

Advantages of UTF-8 Support

When the character set is used, this feature will be used in storage conversion. For example, using UTF-8 to convert the current data type of column containing a Latin string from NCHAR(10) to CHAR(10) results in a 50% reduction in storage needs. CHAR(10) needs 10 bytes to store the same Unicode string, while NCHAR(10) needs 20 bytes.

When setting up SQL Server 2019 preview with CTP 2.1, UTF-8 collation can be chosen as the default setting. With SQL Server Replication, CTP 2.2 offers the option to utilize UTF-8 character encoding.

Intelligent Query Processing

Intelligent Query Processing(IQP) is a method for obtaining an optimal query execution plan with less compiling time. This feature has many sub-features in SQL Server 2019, CTP 2.2.

Factors to consider while executing IQP, especially to generate an execution plan, are the Structures to be used, joins to be made in a query (Hash Join, Nested Loop, Merge Adaptive, etc.), Outer Input, execution mode (Batch or Row execution mode), etc.

The sub-features of SQL Server 2019 are,

For big data scenarios, the server offers an approximate Count Distinct starting with SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.0. The approximative count of distinct non-null values in a group is returned by count distinct. By lowering the memory footprint, this feature improves performance efficiency.
Batch mode is supported for CPU-bound relational DW workloads on the 2019 version of Row Store, provided compatibility level 150. Indexes for column stores are not necessary to use this feature.
To manage memory allocation in Row Mode, use Memory Grant Feedback (Row Mode). In subsequent executions of a row mode query, more memory will be allotted for any operations that require additional disk space. If the query utilizes less than half of the memory allotted, the memory grant will be diminished for subsequent executions.

Resumable Online Index Create

The name itself indicates that we can pause the operation and resume it later from where it stopped instead of starting from the beginning.

One of the most effective tools for database management is the index. The index becomes more dispersed and consequently less effective as more database operations, such as insert, update, and delete, are performed. To counter this, DBAs are using index rebuild operations more and more.

SQL Server 2017 introduced Resumable Online Index Rebuilding (ROIR), a significant feature to improve database performance.

However, a more recent version of the feature “Resumable Online Index Create” is integrated into the SQL Server 2019 version.

Features of Resumable Online Index Create

If you run out of disk space or experience a database loss, you can try creating the index again after it has failed.
In the event of a blockage, stopping the index creation process will temporarily release resources so that the blocked tasks can be completed.
One way to deal with the large number of logs generated by the laborious index creation process is to pause it, back up the log, and then resume it.

Machine Learning on Linux

Microsoft has always intended to blend code and data together. The trend has been changed from T-SQL to U-SQL, which is on Azure, and expanded T-SQL with C# components.

In 2016, SQL Server included embedded R support. This was expanded in 2017 to include Python support for SQL Server, which attracted machine learning people who were not even familiar with SQL Server.

Microsoft always wants to introduce new features that would make SQL Servers on Linux equal to the SQL Servers on Windows. Some of the improvements in SQL Server 2019 on Linux are explained below.

SQL Server 2019 New Features of Machine Learning

Features of SQL Server 2019 are given below.

The SQL Server now supports the new Java language extension apart from R and Python.
Under SQL Restricted User Group (SQLRUserGroup), AppContainers have taken the place of local user accounts.
There has been a change in SQLRUserGroup’s membership availability. SQL Server only has a Launchpad service account, as opposed to the several local user accounts present in the previous version. Now, all R, Python, and Java processes run independently of AppContainers under the Launchpad Service identity.

Always On Availability Group

Always On availability group is a high-availability solution that provides enterprise-level alternative mirroring. It is first introduced for SL Server 2012, to increase the availability of user databases for an enterprise.

Generally, an availability group is designed to support the duplicate environment for a set of user databases called availability databases. It is created for the High Availability or read scale.

An availability replica is the level at which an availability group fails. Database availability issues include complete failover.

Advantages of SQL Server 2019 Always On Availability Group

Availability is improved during the disaster recovery phase when there are more available replicas. For each available database, there are four secondary replicas and one primary replica available for recovery.
Database management is made more efficient with the redirection from secondary to primary replica.
Always On availability groups ensure more effective resource management and increased database availability.

New Features of SQL Server on Linux

Extended support for distributed transactions and transactional replication is available for SQL Server on Linux in 2019.
In the snapshot, merge, and transactional replication topologies, SQL Server 2019 running on Linux instances can take part as a subscriber, publisher, or distributor.
Distributed transactions are possible on Linux instances of SQL Server The new MSDTC Linux version, which operates within the SQL Server process, made this possible.
Better Active Directory integration is available with SQL Server 2019 on Linux. Active Directory offers features like AGs, distributed queries, user authentication, and replication. Moreover, OpenLDAP support is included for external AD providers. Additionally, it offers machine learning within databases.

Security

One of the most important requirements is the security of SQL Server 2019 features. SQL Server is directly involved in database management and procurement.

Always encrypted with a trusted execution environment.
The term encryption was first implemented in SQL Server 2016 for transparent column encryption. However, the drawback is that the SQL Server is unable to decrypt the data, and the SQL queries cannot manipulate actual column values.
Now, SQL Server can safely encode the part of memory to perform on these encrypted columns.

Conclusion

These are all the SQL Server 2019 features. SQL Server 2019 is undoubtedly an improved version compared to the previous version.

There are many technical reasons for companies to choose this version. Most of the features are extensions to the existing features, so there is no new installation or new setup needed. Overall, these features.

SQL Server 2019 Features