SQL Server 2017 and Azure SQL Database introduced a whole new set of query improvements regarding performance. These modifications are all part of the so called “adaptive query processing feature family”, which includes three major changes. I'll focus on the batch mode adaptive joins.
Recently our data wizard Thomas Costers was at a customer who created an indexed view, which spanned multiple tables as part of a release. Because you can't disable lock escalation for an indexed view as you can for a table, he went looking for another solution.
SQL Server 2017 came with a couple of enhancements regarding Always On Availability Groups. The most radical change came with the introduction of “Read-scale availability groups” or the support for Availability Groups without an underlying cluster.