SQL Server Community Technology Preview 3 has been released some days ago.
The SQL Server team added a lot of features related to:
- SQL Server Engine (Query Store, Temporal Tables and In-Memory improvements)
- Cloud-ready stuff (Transactional replication from and to Azure SQL Databases, Stretched database enhancements)
- New releases of Management Studio
- Analysis Services
- Reporting Services (great, let’s say, “new entry”)
- Integration Services
- …
Additionally, we can deal with new programmability features:
DROP IF EXISTS (finally, after many MVP communiry requests), MAXDOP on DBCC statements, sp_set_session_context for creating a session context as a set of key value pairs, and much more.
I’m a fan of the SQL Server 2016 native JSON support right now. This is one of the newest features, and, due to this, it’s a “frequent changing” topic. The CTP3 has been released before our SQL Saturday in Parma, fortunately. Thus, I have to update my slides and demo in three weeks. This is great!
This is the “what’s new” on CTP3 for JSON support:
- OPENJSON() function
- ISJSON() function
- JSON_VALUE() function
- JSON_QUERY() function
I’ll write a blog post for each one of those function in the next days. So we will be ready for #sqlsat462!
Stay tuned! 
