One year after Microsoft released its first public preview of SQL Server 2016, the company has announced its final release date. The software will hit general availability on June 1, with Microsoft positioning it against Oracle in terms of cost, security and speed.

Microsoft is offering three flavors of its database management suite – Enterprise, Standard, Express and the free Developer edition. The latter will pack all of the features found in the Enterprise edition, but is designed for development and testing rather than production workloads. The company is offering a free lifetime license to customers with a Microsoft Software Assurance contract, and is also touting free support for those who switch from Oracle before the end of next month.

“SQL Server 2016 owns the top TPC-E performance benchmarks for transaction processing, the top TPC-H performance benchmarks for data warehousing, and the top performance benchmarks with leading business applications like PROS and KPMG,” said Tiffany Wissner, Microsoft’s director of data platform marketing, in a blog post announcing the news. “Customers can also gain tremendous performance improvement by simply upgrading to SQL Server 2016 without application changes (e.g. queries will run up to 34x faster). In addition to leading performance benchmarks, SQL Server 2016 also delivers top price/performance for both workloads.”

Those might be lofty claims, but new benchmark data from some of Microsoft’s main hardware partners backs them up.

Also, Microsoft reckons SQL Server 2014 users will notice a big speed boost when they upgrade to SQL 2016.

Security-wise, Microsoft says SQL Server 2016 benefits immensely from a new Always Encrypted feature which means data is analyzed without being decrypted by means of “homomorphic encryption”. According to Microsoft’s research, encrypted data can be analyzed effectively and without any significant speed disadvantage, but of course it’s yet to be tested outside of the lab.

There’s also a new data privacy enhancing feature called Dynamic Data Masking (DDM), which was first introduced into Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure SQL Database last year. According to Microsoft, DDM allows users to limit or obfuscate access to data without the need to make any changes to it.

SQL Server 2016 also brings with it the ability to perform advanced R-based business analytics on data stored within it. R is one of the most popular of statistical computing languages used by data scientists for predictive analytics, and the latest SQL Server build (released last month) added a new installer that lets users install a standalone Microsoft R Server. Microsoft added the technology when it acquired Revolution Analytics back in 2015.

Microsoft is aggressively targeting Oracle customers with this release, but it’s unlikely to tempt them over even with the new features it offers, said Gartner Inc. analyst Merv Adrian in an interview with The Register. He pointed out that similar offers in the past have failed to sway Oracle customers, because switching over is often a massively complex and expensive task. Instead, Adrian reckons Microsoft will have a better chance at pinching customers who’re currently using SAP SE’s Sybase, which as the same codebase as SQL Server.

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