The bigger news and unfortunatly hidden behind an innocent blog title about SP1 for SQL Server 2016 is that now all the features of Enterprise Edition are available on all editions of SQL Server!
They haven't made all of the Enterprise Edition features available on all lower editions, but they have made many big ones such as table partitioning, Always Encrypted, in-memory OLTP, etc. available in most lower editions. There are a number of operational features such as piecemeal restores, Resource Governor, online index rebuilds, etc. that are still exclusive to Enterprise Edition.
Not quite all features. AlwaysOn Availability Groups is still limited to two hosts in Standard, and Standard still doesn't have Transparent Database Encryption.
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The bigger news and unfortunatly hidden behind an innocent blog title about SP1 for SQL Server 2016 is that now all the features of Enterprise Edition are available on all editions of SQL Server!
See my commit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12969059
They haven't made all of the Enterprise Edition features available on all lower editions, but they have made many big ones such as table partitioning, Always Encrypted, in-memory OLTP, etc. available in most lower editions. There are a number of operational features such as piecemeal restores, Resource Governor, online index rebuilds, etc. that are still exclusive to Enterprise Edition.
There's a more complete discussion of these here: https://sqlperformance.com/2016/11/sql-server-2016/big-deal-...
Not quite all features. AlwaysOn Availability Groups is still limited to two hosts in Standard, and Standard still doesn't have Transparent Database Encryption.
Even so, this is an exciting change!
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-editio...