Microsoft just announced SQL Server 2016 public preview coming this summer. A couple long waiting features will be really interesting:

• Always Encrypted: Banks, Health Care and insurance companies will be happy.
• Stretch Database: DBA will be happy.
• Real-time Operational Analytics & In-Memory OLTP
• Built-in Advanced Analytics, PolyBase and Mobile BI
• Additional security enhancements for Row-level Security and Dynamic Data Masking to round out our security investments with Always Encrypted.
• Improvements to AlwaysOn for more robust availability and disaster recovery with multiple synchronous replicas and secondary load balancing.
• Native JSON support to offer better performance and support for your many types of your data.
• SQL Server Enterprise Information Management (EIM) tools and Analysis Services get an upgrade in performance, usability and scalability.
• Faster hybrid backups, high availability and disaster recovery scenarios to backup and restore your on-premises databases to Azure and place your SQL Server AlwaysOn secondaries in Azure.

Hooray! Can’t wait to download it.