On November 16th 2016 Microsoft released the availability of SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1 (SP1).
Normally a service pack release isn’t the most exciting news to blog about, but this release is different – This SQL Server 2016 SP1 release includes the addition of many news features previously available only in Enterprise Edition.
Notably, the new sample database, Wide World Importers mentions the Enterprise Edition database as now “For SQL Server 2016 SP1 (or higher), any edition“. It also mentions upgrading to SQL Server 2016 SP1 to benefit from these exciting additions as below;
Some of the features the article mentions are partitioning, compression, change data capture and database snapshot. I created a new Azure with SQL Server 2016 SP1 and created a new index on the sample database with row compression turned on as a example.
A list of the various SQL Server 2016 SP1 editions can be found here and the full SQL Server 2016 SP1 service pack announcement here
Thanks for reading.