Ingredients for SQL Server Version decision We are going the create our Sql-Servers new on new hardware / VM's and think about which Sql-Server Version to go with. We are actually using Sql Server 2008 R2. We have already done a project for testing everything for any compatibility issues between 2008 and 2014 - and have fixed all issues in application code as well as in the db schemas to be ready for 2014. 

Now the question for simply dismissing 2014 and directly go to 2016 came up. We are not sure.

I have ran SQL 2016 Upgrade Advisor - it said "ready for upgrade (2016)" and raised around 500 warnings for deprecated ntext, text and image columns.


Are there any special additional downsides of going to 2016 instead of 2014?
Are there new compatibility issues? AFAIKS there have been no new deprecations in 2016 that are not yet in place of 2014...
What do we have to consider?
The is some information directly from MS that you might find useful: Breaking Changes to Database Engine Features in SQL Server 2016 and Discontinued Database Engine Functionality in SQL Server 2016, which indicate that officially there is very little by way of breaking changes. Those pages link to similar information about older versions too.

As a general rule I recommend going for the latest version for new installations once that version has been released long enough for any major bugs to have been found by someone else and fixed by MS, and SQL2016 had a large enough beta release that anything major should have been found already. But I would also recommend a full regression check of the applications to cover the possibility of:


reliance in your application on undocumented/undefined behaviour that may differ in the newer version: changes to officially undefined behaviour won't be listed in places like the pages linked to above.
performance issues due to changes in the query planner: the new carnality estimation method in 2014 generally lead to noticeable improvements but in a some use cases they had the opposite effect and hints are needed to push the query planner back towards the optimal plan, I'm not aware of such a significant change in that area in SQL2016 but there will no doubt be smaller changes that could have a detrimental effect for a minority of queries/statements.
new and interesting bugs as yet undiscovered.


As is sounds like you have recently performed a large scale regression test, you might not be able to justify (to the business) doing so again this soon in which case sticking with 2014 would be the safer option.