SQL Server 2016 new features

(https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-CA/library/bb500435.aspx)

• Enhanced in-memory performance provides up to 30x faster transactions, more than 100x faster queries than disk-based relational databases and real-time operational analytics.
• New Always Encrypted technology helps protect your data at rest and in motion, on-premises and in the cloud, with master keys sitting with the application, without application changes.
• Stretch Database technology keeps more of your customer’s historical data at your fingertips by transparently stretching your warm and cold OLTP data to Microsoft Azure in a secure manner without application changes.
• Built-in advanced analytics provide the scalability and performance benefits of building and running your advanced analytics algorithms directly in the core SQL Server transactional database.
• Business insights through rich visualizations on mobile devices with native apps for Windows, iOS and Android.
• Simplify management of relational and non-relational data by querying both with T-SQL using PolyBase.
• Faster hybrid backups, high availability and disaster recovery scenarios to back up and restore your on-premises databases to Microsoft Azure and place your SQL Server AlwaysOn secondaries in Azure.
• Can truncate table partition (finally?)
• http://www.infoworld.com/article/3013601/application-development/new-features-in-sql-server-2016.html
• Always Encrypted Data security has always been a major concern. SQL Server 2016 comes in with the Always Encrypted feature that when enabled, protects your data in the SQL Server database using encryption. In using this feature, access to the encrypted sensitive data can be made only by the application that accesses the data stored in the SQL Server 2016 database. The application that has the encryption key can have access to the data -- this encryption key (it's a master key stored in your system) is never passed to SQL Server. 
• Always On The Always On feature (first introduced in SQL Server 2012) has been enhanced to facilitate high availability and disaster recovery of data. Support for DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator) and round-robin load balancing has been introduced in SQL Server 2016. 
• Native JSON support JSON is a standardized data exchange format widely in use these days. SQL Server 2016 provides support for JSON imports and exports. Support for parsing and storing JSON is in-built in SQL Server 2016. 
• Stretch Database When the Stretch Database (also known as Stretch DB) feature is enabled for one or more tables of your local database, SQL Server 2016 can dynamically archive data in a secure manner from your local SQL Server database onto the Azure SQL database hosted in the cloud. Hence this version of SQL Server facilitates seamless migration of your data to Microsoft Azure sans any downtime. 
• Hekaton enhancements The In-Memory OLTP engine that was introduced with SQL Server 2014 helps you to create in-memory tables and then perform I/O operations against them in memory for lower latency and improved performance. Note that Hekaton is another name for the In-Memory OLTP engine in SQL Server. Performing I/O operations against these in-memory tables result in faster reads and writes as your application can read from and write to the memory much faster compared to disk reads and writes. 
• Support for in-database analytics with R-integration SQL Server 2016 provides support for advanced analytics to facilitate a deeper insight into your data. This is the first version of Microsoft's flagship database product to have an integrated support for Revolution R for statistical analysis of your data.