1. New BI Features SQL 2016 New features of SQL 2016

2. Joe Blackburn  Business Intelligence Consultant with Omni Resources.  Working with SQL Server Stack for 10 years focusing mostly on Business Intelligence  Married with a wife and 3 kids  Hockey is a passion of mine and I have been coaching hockey for 5 years and played for 20 years.  Contact joe.blackburn@omniresources.comjoe.blackburn@omniresources.com  Twitter @josephblackburn

3. Problem: Needing to set up a Data Warehouse/Datamart  Can not impact the transactional system(s)  When dealing with small companies budgets don’t always allow to build a Kimball style star-schemed data  Companies don’t always have the time, money, or knowledge to do this

4. Solution: In-Memory OLTP (Online Transaction Processing)  Introduced in SQL 2014 code named Hekaton (greek for 100) because the goal was to make OLTP 100 times faster then disk-based tables.  High performance, memory- optimized tables reside permanently in-memory  Allow for real time analytics

5. Improvements in SQL 2016 OLTP  Supported Size of Tables 256GB to 2 TB  Security Transparent Data Encryption/Always on encryption are supported no longer need to decide if speed is more important than security  Development In 2014 no modifications were allowed. 2016 now allows ALTER TABLE, ALTER PROC and sp_recompile  Parallelism Parallel plans are supported. Benefit of joining columnstore with memory optimized tables. Allows for real-time analytics!!!

6. Improvements in SQL 2016 OLTP  New Supported T-SQL  {LEFT|RIGHT} OUTER JOIN  Disjunction (OR,NOT)  UNION [ALL]  SELECT DISTINCT Subqueries (EXISTS, IN, scalar)  FOREIGN KEY  Nested Stored Procedures (EXECUTE)  Natively compiled scalar UDFs  Indexes on NULLABLE columns

7. SQL 2016 OLTP Wrap Up  Allows for BI to hit the transactional tables of applications/systems without significantly affected performance  Allows for real time analytics without running ETL packages on a regular frequency Questions?

8. Problem: Need for setting up slowly changing dimensions  Consider when a new manager is assigned to a department, should their salary be applied to the whole year average or only the time period that they were assigned?  SQL 2014 and Prior  Create a Slowly Changing Dimension Type 2  Provide multiple rows for a given dimension (allows for historical changes)  Needed a surrogate key (provided uniqueness and allowed duplicate values)  Need to add start date/time and end date/time  Design and population was complex, manual, and time consumming

9. Solution: Temporal Tables  Temporal tables can be defined in any database and will automatically track data changes with start and end times  Consists of two tables (Current and history)  Current represents the latest data and history all previous updates  Existing tables can be altered to become temporal tables without having to change existing application queries

10. Temporal Tables  Prerequisites that must be met:  A primary key must be defined  Two columns must be defined to record the start and end date with a data type of datetime2. If needed, these columns can be hidden using the HIDDEN flag. These columns are called the SYSTEM_TIME period columns.  INSTEAD OF triggers are not allowed. AFTER triggers are only allowed on the current table.  In-memory OLTP cannot be used

11. Temporal Tables

12.  You can query the history table directly, but since it doesn’t contain the current values you wouldn’t normally touch it. Instead, you should always query the base table using one of these operations:  Point in time: AS OF  Exclusive bounds: FROM to  Upper and lower bounds: BETWEEN AND  Example Queries  FROM Customer FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF ‘2015-1-1’ WHERE CustomerID = 27  FROM Customer FOR SYSTEM_TIME BETWEEN ‘2015-1-1’ AND ‘2015-2-1’ WHERE CustomerID = 27 Questions?

13. Problem: Determining how much data to keep in Data Warehouse  Need to keep transactional data for long periods of time?  Looking to save money on storage?  Stretch Database gives you the ability to store portions of a database in the cloud  Seemless migrate data to Azure and allow to archive data without having to change the way your applications query the data

14. Solution: Enable Stretch Database  To enable Stretch Database on an instance run:

15. Enable Stretch Database  Run the Enable Database for Stretch Wizard  Sets up connection between On-Premise and Azure  Ensures there are no issues that would prevent stretch from occuring

16. Enable Stretch Database  Code to actually stretch the database Questions?

17. Problem: Reporting Services is Terrible  Quite possibly the least impressive reporting tool ever!  Looks like it hasn’t changed since SQL 2000  Terrible Visualizations  Printing issues

18. Solution: Revamped Reporting Services to bring to 2015/2016  You can now customize the parameter pane. You can place the parameters where ever you like.  Drag and drop placement of parameters  Enhanced report templates and themes; all customizable using CSS  Easily create reusable company branding for all reports; apply consistently

19. Whats new in SSRS 2016  PDF replaces Active X for Remote Printing  No more Active X downloads  Works across all supported browsers including Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome

20. What’s new in SSRS 2016  HTML5 rendering engine that targets modern web “full” standards mode and modern browsers.  Option to use compatibility mode and use previous rendering engine  Complete modernized UI. Modern look and feel with streamlined UI elements

21. What’s new in SSRS 2016  PowerPoint Rendering and Exporting  Pin to Power BI Dashboard

22. What’s new in SSRS 2016  New Visualizations. Most of the visualizations you find in PowerBI are now available.

23. What’s new in SSRS 2016  R Data Visualization are now available in SSRS.  12 th most popular programming language  It is hard to miss R if you love working with data. It is literally everywhere and now it is in SSRS  Leverage R scripts from data scientists instead of redeveloping the wheel Questions?