Following the introduction of R Services in 2016, v14 rebranded to "Machine Learning Services" and added Python support. Having sp_execute_external_script running Python scripts directly inside the database engine eliminates the need to move massive datasets to an external application layer for analytics. This is a massive performance win for data scientists.
It was the first version of SQL Server to run on Linux, in addition to Windows and Docker containers.
Version 14.0 integrated graph database features directly into the relational engine. This allows users to create node and edge tables to model complex many-to-many relationships, which is ideal for social networks, recommendation engines, and fraud detection. Performance and Analytics