Microsoft recently announced the first public Community Technology Preview (CTP2) for SQL Server 2016. It is available for download from this location:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-sql-server-2016
If you didn’t get a chance to try it out yet, below are step by step screenshots from a standard SQL Server 2016 CTP2 installation with all options selected. We know that many new features are coming in SQL Server 2016 but from what I saw so far the installation process is pretty much similar to what we’ve seen before in SQL Server 2014.
Some quick observations:
- SQL Server 2016 can’t be installed on anything below Windows Server 2012 (server-side) or Windows 8 (desktop-side). This is to be expected but still … good to know. I know many .NET developers still run Windows 7 for example as their development environment so SQL Server 2016 won’t install there (whereas SQL Server 2014 installs just fine on Windows 7). Here are the full technical requirements for SQL Server 2016 – https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143506%28v=sql.130%29.aspx
- I installed SQL Server 2016 CTP2 on a newly created virtual machine running Windows Server 2012 R2 and I was quite surprised to see as part of the requirements for SQL Server 2016 that it needed Oracle Java JRE 7 Update 51 or higher. I’m not sure yet what component of SQL Server 2016 depends on that – this one will be interesting to watch as more people start trying out the software. I ended up getting the latest Oracle JRE from this location – http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html.
Enjoy!