Here are the key new features and enhancements in SQL Server 2022.
Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server
- Deploy and run SQL Server instances on Azure Arc, allowing hybrid capabilities.
- Unified management, monitoring, security, and compliance across on-prem and cloud.
- Scale up/down vCores and storage dynamically based on workload demands.
- Built-in high availability with distributed availability groups across a hybrid environment.
Big Data Clusters
- Query data in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) using T-SQL.
- Ingest real-time IoT telemetry into the cluster using Kafka connectors.
- Run analytics on big data using Apache Spark pools for faster insights.
- Build end-to-end machine learning pipelines for training and scoring.
- Easily deploy BDC across containers, Kubernetes, Azure Stack HCI, or SQL Server VMs.
Row-Level Security
- Granular access control using row-level security predicate expressions.
- Dynamic data masking for obfuscating specific cells in a row.
- Cell-level encryption by encrypting data in specific table columns.
- Effective separation of duties while minimizing privileges needed.
Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves
- Compute over encrypted data within SGX enclaves.
- Enable rich queries, sorting; grouping joins on encrypted columns.
- Improved performance by processing parts of the query in the enclave.
- Reduced cryptographic overhead for the database engine.
- Integrated with Intel SGX, Windows VBS, and Linux enclaves.
JSON Enhancements
- JSON path expressions enable optimized querying and indexing of JSON.
- Built-in functions like JSON_VALUE, JSON_QUERY, and JSON_MODIFY for easier manipulation.
- Improved performance for querying nested JSON properties.
- Index individual fields within JSON documents.
- Better space utilization using partial JSON indexing.
Summary
Key focus areas are advanced analytics, security, performance, hybrid cloud, and deeper JSON integration.