The release of SQL Server 2017 provides lots of interesting new features for SQL administrators and developers. In this blog post, we’ll be discussing what’s new in the database engine of SQL Server 2017.

Released in November 2016, Microsoft SQL Server 2017 comes with a lot of mouth-watering new features that offer faster processing, more flexibility of use, and greater cost savings as a result.

Microsoft SQL Server 2017 comes with improved adaptive query processing features. It can be used to improve the performance of your query in both the SQL Server and SQL Database.

The server does this by choosing a better execution plan for the query and even ensures that the execution plan is modified in real time resulting in faster running queries. This feature is also useful for Batch Mode Memory Grant Feedback, Batch Mode Adaptive Joins and Interleaved Execution.

SQL Server 2017 provides graph data capabilities. A Graph DB acts like a relational database and is simply a collection of edge and nodes. With this new feature, database administrators will no longer have to make use of some of the specialized graph database like Blazegraph, Neo4j, or the other popular graph and multi-model databases. The data can now be stored directly in the SQL Server itself in graph format with the aid of edges and nodes. This also means that you can query it using node/edge query syntax.

For the first time, SQL Server is available on Linux meaning that you can install SQL Server 2017 on a Mac using Linux(ubuntu), Windows, or Docker while you can also deploy them on these platforms.

Microsoft introduced some new string functions such as TRANSLATE, BULK IMPORT, STRING_AGG, CONCAT_WS, WITHIN GROUP and TRIM in SQL Server 2017. These new strings will certainly help T-SQL developers carry out their day to day tasks with ease.

It is now possible to configure the Always-on Availability group without windows cluster in SQL Server 2017. With this feature, cross-database transactions are now possible against different SQL instances while it also supports database distributed transactions.

This special feature in SQL Server 2017 enables you to pause and resume your index rebuilds while in progress without having to completely stop it and start all over again. It also allows you to control the impact of the index rebuilds on the performance of your application, while you can easily pause or resume the session when necessary.

While the SQL Server 2016 integrated the R programming, SQL Server 2017 allows you to execute both the R and Python script within the database server. Adding Python to the 2017 version will provide enough power for the SQL Server to carry out advanced analytics, statistical computing, and easy data transformations capabilities.

Before now, it is rather impossible to provide the filegroup name where you want to create the new table using both the ON keyword with SELECT INTO statement. However, SQL Server 2017 allows you to provide the name of the filegroup on which you can create the new table using the SELECT INTO statement.

This database feature notifies you whenever there’s a potential performance problem and recommends solutions. It enables you to apply corrective actions or allows the Database Engine to fix performance problems automatically.