I have been trying out the CTP2 release that came out a couple of days ago and wanted to write about a couple of things I’ve seen so far.

First, I kind of like the Live Query Statistics feature.  The first time that I ran a query with live statistics everything seemed to hang up for about four minutes, displaying a message to the effect that it was preparing the query.  I’m guessing this more a function of initializing stuff under-the-hood on the underpowered VM that I’m using, because subsequent processing has been much speedier.

In the few queries that I’ve tested out so far, there hasn’t been too much excitement, but can certainly see how live statistics can be a useful diagnostic tool at times.

I also tried playing around with Dynamic Data Masking.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get things to work even using the sample given on the page.  Specifically, the line:

ALTER TABLE Membership ALTER COLUMN FirstName ADD MASKED WITH (FUNCTION = 'partial(1,"XXXXXXX",0)');

results in an error:

Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Line 8
Incorrect syntax near 'masked'.

The syntax appears to be correct according to the ALTER TABLE documentation, so I’m not sure if the syntax has been changed or if something isn’t quite working correctly in SQL Server.

One more thing.  When I install Management Studio, one of the first things I change is the setting to send the results to a new tab and to automatically switch to the new tab when query execution is done (Tools -> Options -> Query Results -> SQL Server -> Results to Grid).  To my annoyance, queries execute fine, but SSMS does not automatically switch to a new tab.  This happens even after a restart of SSMS.  However, I have not yet tried this on a different installation.

All that said, I really like a lot of the new features in SQL Server 2016 and look forward to further experimentation.

UPDATE:  It turns out that a pair of trace flags needed to be enabled in CTP 2.0 for the dynamic data masking to work correctly.  Starting in CTP 2.1, these trace flags were enabled by default and the sample code works as expected.

As of CTP 3.0, the switch to results tab features is still not working in Management Studio.  I have submitted a Connect item to address this bug.

UPDATE: Awesome! As of CTP 3.1, switch to results tab looks to be working!