Well there were quite a few announcements in the SQL Server world last week.

SQL Server vNext CTP was made available for download, the big news there is that that version will be available either on Windows or Linux. The Linux version of SQL has been in private preview for a while but for a lot of people out there (myself included) this was the first time that they could get their hands on the product.

However mad this may sound, SQL running on Linux wasn’t the biggest news for me last week. We’ve all known that Microsoft was going to release a SQL version for Linux for a while now so it wasn’t that much of a shock to the system. What was a shock was the first point in a blog detailing the first service pack for SQL Server 2016.

As of SQL Server 2016 SP 1 many of the features of SQL Server that were previously only available in Enterprise Edition will be available in the other editions where possible.

This is big news for me as what this means is that instead of scaling up our server running Enterprise Edition, we could scale out i.e. – build multiple new servers running SQL Server Standard Edition and split our workload across them for a fraction of the cost of our current Enterprise licence.

I mean OK, not all Enterprise features are available (no online operations for a start) and there is still the CPU and memory limits in the lower editions but the option of scaling out cannot be ignored (for purely fiscal reasons). I can see some interesting design discussions coming my way in the near future, and that’s a good thing.

Communication in the workplace.

With the release of Microsoft Teams we now have a dazzlingly array of software designed to increase communication between workers and departments in the workplace. There’s the old staple that is email, instant messengers such as Skype for Business and now relatively new systems such as Teams, Yammer or Slack.

I have to admit that I’m kinda on the Slack fanboy bandwagon. I find it a much better tool than Skype for Business mainly due to the fact that I find it less intrusive in my daily work. When someone sends me a message on Skype I find that I’m obliged to respond immediately whereas with Slack I feel I have the option to finish what I’m doing and then get back to whoever messaged me. Anyone else feel like that or am I on my own in that way of thinking?

Another feature that’s helped me out a lot is the ability to send messages to an entire channel. Before I would send an email to a certain department’s group address and wait for a response but now I can post in a channel and (hopefully) someone will get back to me.

Slack’s big problem will be Teams. A lot of companies will already be paying for Office 365 which Teams will come with, so why pay extra for Slack? I’ve had a brief look at Teams and the functionality that’s there is pretty much exactly the same as Slack so I think it’s a no-brainer that companies will prefer using Teams. Or…will they though? Slack’s user interface is a lot better than Teams (what’s with the purple?) and Slack also has the ability for me to be logged into different sites in the same app.

For instance, I have my work’s Slack but I’m also logged into the SQL Server & Irish Tech communities. This has given me access to a huge online tech presence who I can talk to and draw resources from. So I don’t really want to give that up, I guess in the end I’ll end up having email, Slack, Skype for Business and Teams open whilst working. Ah well…could be worse.