'One of my most favorite technologies is Columnstore. Thankfully, the guys at Microsoft seem to agree with me, because they continue developing this technology and make it faster and faster.
In a nutshell, as oppose to what we’re used to today, a Columnstore index keeps our data at the column-level instead of the row-level. Because the values of the same column have the same data type and tend to repeat themselves, there are many options for optimizations and compressing the data.'...
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/db-newsfeed/2016/04/27/columnstore-index-enhancements-in-sql-server-2016/
'Few days back, one of my friends asked me whether there is a way to find the last accessed date of their SQL Server databases. What he really wanted was, finding out databases that are not being used. Nothing came into my mind immediately. I tried to remember a catalog view, a dynamic management function for this but nothing popped up.'...
http://dinesql.blogspot.de/2010/05/when-was-my-sql-server-database-last.html
'I have just inherited a SQL Server database server with numerous databases on it and I need to know if all the databases are in use or if they are old and can be removed. What is the best way to find out if databases are still active on my SQL Server?'...
https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/3171/identify-sql-server-databases-that-are-no-longer-in-use/
'With the increasing number of incidents of lost and unauthorized exposure to sensitive data, database security is a vital and growing concern for many enterprises. Publicly owned enterprises that hold sensitive data such as social security numbers or credit card numbers in their databases should encrypt their sensitive data both at the database and operating system layer. This is to comply with the statutory requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley act, PCI-DSS, HIPPA for industries such as healthcare and banking...
Fortunately, the next version of Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server 2016 addresses these issues and makes data encryption easier through its new AlwaysEncrypted feature. This feature uses an enhanced ADO.NET client-side library and cipher text to encrypt and decrypt data.'...
http://www.sswug.org/basitaalishanmasood-al-farooq/sql-server/encrypting-sensitive-within-databases-using-sql-server-2016-alwaysencrypted-feature/
'A common problem faced by SQL server administrators is the unexpectedly large size to which transaction log files often grow. Large transaction log files pose many problems to the server itself such as sluggish performance, threat of data corruption, server downtime and server inaccessibility. It thus becomes a priority to deal with such huge files at the earliest before they can cause hindrances in the normal working of the server.
In this article we’ll be focusing on this issue and detailing the causes behind this problem, ways to prevent it from happening (if possible) and tips to resolve it.'...
http://www.sqlserver-dba.com/2015/12/how-to-deal-with-unexpectedly-large-transaction-log-files.html