The Public Preview of SQL Server 2016 is available for download on the Microsoft downloads site. The feature highlights are available in this blog post. I thought I will give blog about what’s different in the setup of the Database Engine.

The basic screens remain the same. The screen to select the edition is the same and the there is no change in the “License Terms”, “Global Rules”, “Product Update”, “Install Setup Files”, “Install Rules” and “Setup Role” pages.

The first major change that you will notice is in the “Feature Selection” page. This is where you will notice a change. Namely, the “PolyBase Query Service for External Data“. This installs two services:

1. SQL Server Polybase Engine Service which creates, coordinates and executes the parallel query plan against external data sources.

2. SQL Server Polybase Data Movement Service which manages communication and data transfer between SQL Server and the external data sources which will be used by the instance.

Note that these services are not instance aware and like Integration Services, there can only be one service per Windows host.

The next screen where you will notice a change is the Feature Rules page which checks if Oracle JRE 7 Update 51 is available or not. This is required for the PolyBase service since I had selected that in the previous screen.

If you don’t have the requisite Oracle JRE version running, then you will be prompted with the following message:
Rule “Oracle JRE 7 Update 51 (64-bit) or higher is required” failed.

This computer does not have the Oracle Java SE Runtime Environment Version 7 Update 51 (64-bit) or higher installed. The Oracle Java SE Runtime Environment is software provided by a third party. Microsoft grants you no rights for such third-party software. You are responsible for and must separately locate, read and accept applicable third-party license terms. To continue, download the Oracle SE Java Runtime Environment from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=526030.

The forwarding link will take you to a webpage where you can download the latest JRE update. Once that is done, you will be able to continue with the installation. Another interesting part was the check for KB2919355 which is the Windows 8.1 Update which contains a cumulative set of security updates, critical updates and updates. So the setup has an OS related check as well.

The Server Configuration page allows you to choose the service accounts for the two PolyBase services.

The Database Engine Configuration page comes with a nifty tempdb file configuration which has a bit of learning to do but provides the opportunity to create additional tempdb files during the installation itself.

Once the setup is complete, you can connect to the database engine using Management Studio and you will see that your version number is 13.0.200. Also, you will notice that there are three user databases: DWConfiguration, DWDiagnostics and DWQueue which is related to the PolyBase service. More on that maybe in a future post.

So that was all about the Database Engine setup for the new SQL Server 2016 Public Preview release.

Disclaimer: Some information in this topic is preview and subject to change in future releases. Preview information describes new features or changes to existing features in Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Community Technology Preview 2 (CTP2).