Microsoft announce that SQL Server 2017 will be generally available on 2nd October 2017. The blog post announcement is here: http://bit.ly/2xDEo4E and gives you some detail on the (actually quite exciting) new features that will be part of SQL Server 2017.

However, if you’re more interested in a summary, here are the top three things to know from a licensing perspective:

• A new “Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server” allows customers to re-use existing on-premises SQL Server licences to run database-as-a-service in Azure
• R Server is renamed “Machine Learning Server for Hadoop” and is now available to all SQL Server Enterprise edition customers as an SA benefit
• It’s the first version of SQL Server to run on Windows Server, Linux and Docker, and there’s a new “SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux offer” which gives discounts off both SQL Server 2017 and the operating system to help with migrations