Efficient data management keeps goods flowing smoothly in Denmark. Danske Fragtmaend, the countrys largest national transport and distribution firm, has been moving freight for more than a century. Today, Danske Fragtmaend delivers more than 40,000 consignments each day throughout Denmark, and businesses from small mom-and-pop operations to factories rely on its services.The firm handles logistics in a central location, where 200 dispatchers keep an eye on the movement of thousands of trucks and their cargo. Both drivers and dispatchers need the latest information to operate efficiently, so they rely on a data platform based on SQL Server 2016. The storage system includes 160 terabytes of flash memory for fast I/O and high uptimes. Throughout the day, drivers continually scan transactions with PDAs and send shipping information including GPS coordinates to the data platform. Fast access to information is essential. Ulf Preisler, chief information officer at Danske Fragtmaend, says, When it comes to short-term logistics, youve got to think like an air traffic controller more than a traditional radio dispatcher.Because the data changes rapidly, asynchronous replication between geographically disparate datacenters was inadequate. Instead, Danske Fragtmaend runs SQL Server on Windows 2016. Windows Server 2016 introduces a new disaster recovery and preparedness feature, Storage Replica, which enables storage-agnostic, synchronous replication of data across geographically diverse datacenters. Even if disaster strikes one location, all the data exists elsewhere, so there is no possibility of loss.Best of all, companies that combine flash storage with the latest versions of SQL Server and Windows Server can achieve a multiplying effect on performance. Danske Fragmaends lead software developer, Morten Vinther, ran several tests to compare the old storage stack with the new one. After combining the new all-flash infrastructure and the features from SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016, one of our BI queries ran 9,521 times faster than on the prior infrastructure. That is much more than we expected.To find out more about Danske Fragtmaends SQL Server 2016 implementation, read the customer story.Customer Name: Danske FragtmaendIndustry: Transportation and logisticsCountry or Region: DenmarkCustomer Website: www.fragt.dkEmployee Size: 900from SQL Server Blog http://ift.tt/2qoECsD This post was authored by Andrea Lam, Program Manager, SQL ServerWe are happy to announce the full release of the Microsoft JDBC Driver 6.2 for SQL Server. The JDBC Driver provides Java database connectivity from any Java application, application server or Java-enabled applet to Microsoft SQL Server, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The driver is open source and available at no additional charge.Whats newPerformance improvements for Prepared StatementsImproved performance for Prepared Statements through caching (including prepared statement handle re-use). This behavior can be tuned using new properties to fit your applications needs.Azure Active Directory (AAD) support for LinuxConnect your Linux applications to Azure SQL Database using AAD authentication via username/password and access token methods.Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) enabled Java virtual machinesThe JDBC Driver can now be used on Java virtual machines (JVMs) that run in FIPS 140 compliance mode to meet federal standards and compliance.Kerberos Authentication ImprovementsThe JDBC Driver now has support for:Principal/Password method for applications where the Kerberos configuration cannot be modified