Well there were quite a few announcements in the SQL Server world last week.

SQL Server vNext CTP was made available for download, the big news there is that that version will be available either on Windows or Linux. The Linux version of SQL has been in private preview for a while but for a lot of people out there (myself included) this was the first time that they could get their hands on the product.

However mad this may sound, SQL running on Linux wasn’t the biggest news for me last week. We’ve all known that Microsoft was going to release a SQL version for Linux for a while now so it wasn’t that much of a shock to the system. What was a shock was the first point in a blog detailing the first service pack for SQL Server 2016.

As of SQL Server 2016 SP 1 many of the features of SQL Server that were previously only available in Enterprise Edition will be available in the other editions where possible.

This is big news for me as what this means is that instead of scaling up our server running Enterprise Edition, we could scale out i.e. – build multiple new servers running SQL Server Standard Edition and split our workload across them for a fraction of the cost of our current Enterprise licence.

I mean OK, not all Enterprise features are available (no online operations for a start) and there is still the CPU and memory limits in the lower editions but the option of scaling out cannot be ignored (for purely fiscal reasons). I can see some interesting design discussions coming my way in the near future, and that’s a good thing.