SQL 2016 has been released for general availability now
You can find the download links from MSDN
The evaluation period is for 180 days
SQL 2016 comes with lots of useful and cool features including
- Native JSON support
- Always Encrypted to protect sensitive data
- Integration of R analytics scripts in T-SQL
- Dynamic Data Masking
- Polybase querying for integration with Hadoop, blob data etc
- QueryStore providing historical execution plan information
- Temporal tables with data versioning
Check out the announcement in official SQLServer blog for more details
One more exciting news is that SQLServer developer edition is now free starting from 2014 onwards.
This provides us with one more compelling reason for trying out this exciting new release
