data-konzept

'Service Pack 2 (12.0.5000) was released on July 11, 2016, and includes 53 fixes and enhancements – including all of the fixes up to and including SP1 CU7. The official Knowledge Base article is KB #3171021, and you can download the service pack here and the updated feature pack here. 

Some very interesting improvements in Service Pack 2, many of which were already included in SQL Server 2016. There were others, so this list should not be considered exhaustive, just OUR TOP 20:

• Showplan XML will now include any trace flags in effect, actual rows read, per-operator performance metrics, and more details on spills.

• New query hints to control memory grants (without Resource Governor).

• Buffer pool can now exceed 8 TB (I'm sure a lot of us were hampered by this limitation).

• Better read workload throughput via reduced spinlocks.

• Automatic soft-NUMA partitioning.

• Database lock partitioning (without using trace flags 1236 / 9024 – also in SP1).

• Performance improvements in spatial (trace flag 6533).

• MAXDOP support for several DBCC CHECK* operations.

• Dynamic memory object scaling.

• Import and export UTF-8 data with BCP / BULK INSERT.

• New DMF, sys.dm_db_incremental_stats_properties (see Connect #797156).

• New DMF, sys.dm_exec_input_buffer, for retrieving correlated INPUTBUFFER information.

• Index usage stats no longer get cleared after a rebuild (see Connect #739566).

• New error log diagnostics for tempdb, instant file initialization, and Availability Group lease timeouts.

• DBCC CLONEDATABASE() – create a stats-only copy of a database with minimal effort.'...

http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/team-posts/latest-builds-sql-server-2014/

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlreleaseservices/sql-2014-service-pack-2-is-now-available/