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Yes SQL 2016 has native support for JSON, CTEs (this one has been in since 2005), and windowed functions I believe were also in 2005.

Some other massive improvements are Columnstore indexes for absolutely ridiculous OLAP data reads and compression (we are seeing 90% compression and < 1 sec instant lookup times on multi-billion-row fact tables).

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What is MSSQL's replication story these days? Master/slave or master/master? Automatic failover?

The short of it is that it's pretty good. They call it "Always On", and you can do both asynchronous and synchronous, with the latter offering automated failover.

Automatic failover with read-only replicas.

No master/master - that's the only thing I would consider missing compared to Oracle. It scales up, but not out. Peer to peer replication technically is master/master, but calling that clunky would be a kindness.

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