'The SQL Server team is excited to bring you the last service pack release for SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 4 (SP4) in addition to a rollup of released hotfixes contains 20+ improvements centered around performance, scalability and diagnostics based on the feedback from customers and SQL community. These improvements enable SQL Server 2012 to perform faster and scale out of the box on modern hardware design. It also showcases the SQL Product Team’s commitment to provide continued value into in-market releases.
SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 4 will include
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All fixes and CUs for SQL 2012 up to and including SQL Server 2012 SP3 CU9.
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Scalability and performance improvements for SQL Server.
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Additional monitoring capabilities through enhancements in DMV, Extended Events and Query Plans
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New improvements based on connect feedback items filed by the SQL Community.
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Some of the Improvements originally introduced in SQL 2014 SP2 and SQL Server 2016 SP1.
SQL Server 2012 SP4 will be released next month and a release announcement with detailed information on improvements will be shared at the time of the release.'...
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlreleaseservices/announcing-sql-server-2012-service-pack-4/
'We are excited to announce the public preview availability of two new command line tools for SQL Server:
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The mssql-scripter tool enables developers, DBAs, and sysadmins to generate CREATE and INSERT T-SQL scripts for database objects in SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, and Azure SQL DW from the command line.
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The DBFS tool enables DBAs and sysadmins to monitor SQL Server more easily by exposing live data from SQL Server Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) as virtual files in a virtual directory on Linux operating systems.
Read on for detailed usage examples, try out these new command line tools, and give us your feedback.'...
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2017/05/17/try-new-sql-server-command-line-tools-to-generate-t-sql-scripts-and-monitor-dynamic-management-views/
'Microsoft is excited to announce a new preview for the next version of SQL Server (SQL Server 2017). Community Technology Preview (CTP) 2.1 is available on both Windows and Linux. In this preview, we added manageability features to make it easier to configure SQL Server in Docker containers. We’re also introducing some new command line tools for managing SQL Server in our GitHub repo. And, there’s a preview of SQL Server Integration Services on Linux to try! You can try the SQL Server 2017 preview in your choice of development and test environments now: www.microsoft.com/sqlserver2017.
Key CTP 2.1 enhancements
The primary enhancement to SQL Server 2017 in this release is the ability to configure SQL Server configuration settings through environment variables passed in as parameters to docker run. This enables many of the SQL Server configuration scenarios in Docker containers such as setting the collation.
For additional detail on CTP 2.1, please visit What’s New in SQL Server 2017, Release Notes and Linux documentation.'...
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dataplatforminsider/2017/05/17/sql-server-2017-ctp-2-1-now-available/
'PerfCollector provides thorough insight into Windows and SQL Server performance data in real-time combined with extreme reliability and accuracy. Data collection process is light-weight, blazing fast and efficient. It is designed to collect more than 200 crucial performance metrics from multiple servers remotely. You will have the remarkable ability to monitor any server in real-time and to analyze the health status of any Windows and SQL Server instance at any given time.
The performance metrics collector process (PerfCollector.exe) is a command line executable and it is a native machine code; it is smaller, faster and has no dependencies. And of course, it has nearly no impact on the monitored server while collecting metrics data.
Some potential uses of this tool:
Real-time performance monitoring and research.
Historical performance data review and trend analysis.
Load testing of Windows and SQL Server.'...
http://sqltouch.blogspot.de/2017/03/the-fastest-and-agentless-performance.html