Here are the key new features and enhancements in SQL Server 2022.

Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server

  • Deploy and run SQL Server instances on Azure Arc, allowing hybrid capabilities.
  • Unified management, monitoring, security, and compliance across on-prem and cloud.
  • Scale up/down vCores and storage dynamically based on workload demands.
  • Built-in high availability with distributed availability groups across a hybrid environment.

Big Data Clusters

  • Query data in Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) using T-SQL.
  • Ingest real-time IoT telemetry into the cluster using Kafka connectors.
  • Run analytics on big data using Apache Spark pools for faster insights.
  • Build end-to-end machine learning pipelines for training and scoring.
  • Easily deploy BDC across containers, Kubernetes, Azure Stack HCI, or SQL Server VMs.

Row-Level Security

  • Granular access control using row-level security predicate expressions.
  • Dynamic data masking for obfuscating specific cells in a row.
  • Cell-level encryption by encrypting data in specific table columns.
  • Effective separation of duties while minimizing privileges needed.

Always Encrypted with Secure Enclaves

  • Compute over encrypted data within SGX enclaves.
  • Enable rich queries, sorting; grouping joins on encrypted columns.
  • Improved performance by processing parts of the query in the enclave.
  • Reduced cryptographic overhead for the database engine.
  • Integrated with Intel SGX, Windows VBS, and Linux enclaves.

JSON Enhancements

  • JSON path expressions enable optimized querying and indexing of JSON.
  • Built-in functions like JSON_VALUE, JSON_QUERY, and JSON_MODIFY for easier manipulation.
  • Improved performance for querying nested JSON properties.
  • Index individual fields within JSON documents.
  • Better space utilization using partial JSON indexing.

Summary

Key focus areas are advanced analytics, security, performance, hybrid cloud, and deeper JSON integration.