In the past week, Microsoft have been quite busy releasing updates and announcing plans related to SQL Server. To cap everything off, the Redmond-based tech giant announced an aggressive migration offer intended for Oracle database customers.

Microsoft announced that should Oracle customers decide to migrate to SQL Server 2016, the company will offer free licensing for the lifetime of products including full technical support. Microsoft made the offer during the special Data Driven day in New York on March 10. The tech giant claims that it can build a much more affordable database system fir a tenth of the cost of a comparable Oracle system.

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In a statement acquired by The Register, Microsoft North America president Judson Althoff said, "I got a few emails, most from customers asking if they are eligible for this. Everyone is eligible for this. We're super excited to help you migrate off Oracle and build a data estate sing SQL Server."

Although the Microsoft offer sounds very interesting, there is a handful of caveats to the deal. According to Tech Crunch, companies will have to be signed up to the Microsoft Software Assurance program. Moreover, if companies want to take advantage of Microsoft's onsite technical support to help with data migration and train company staff, they are required to sign up before June 30.

In terms of online and data security, Microsoft claims that the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology reported that SQL Server has had the least number of vulnerabilities discovered on any database product. Microsoft added that the new code will also feature end-to-end encryption as well as homomorphic encryption in order to enable records to be analysts without the need to decrypt the information.

Despite all these interesting features, Microsoft's key selling points is still the speed of how its SQL Server works. The tech giant claims that the new version of SQL Server is fast especially for in-memory processing. Microsoft noted that it will run 25 percent faster than the current code and it does require hardware upgrade. For these reasons, Microsoft said that online transaction processing speeds will see a significant increase.