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Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference kicked off this week, and, in what some saw as a surprise, Microsoft announced the next version of its flagship database platform--to be branded as SQL Server 2019.
In previous years, SQL Server updates were released two to five years after their respective predecessors. More recently, however, there has been a yearly cadence of updates. Many had expected that to continue, but it's easy to see why the next version is SQL Server 2019 and not SQL Server 2018.
Indeed, with SQL Server 2019--the public preview of which can be downloaded here--Microsoft is expanding its bet on both open source technologies and Apache Spark. SQL Server 2017 ushered in the ability to deploy SQL Server in containers and added support for running on the Linux platform. This marked the first time that...