Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Versions

February 2023 Updates for Azure Synapse Analytics

Ryan Majidimehr has a new round-up for us:

Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.3 has been in Public Preview since November 2022. We are excited to announce that after notable improvements in performance and stability, Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.3 now becomes Generally Available and ready for production workloads.   

The essential changes include features that come from upgrading Apache Spark to version 3.3.1, Delta Lake to version 2.2.0, and Python to 3.10. 

This month’s set of changes isn’t quite as big as some prior months, though there are a couple items of great importance to make up for it.

Comments closed

Removing SQL Server Native Client 2012

Sean Gallardy answers a question:

I see many questions, and have been on the receiving end of many myself, about out of support items and removing them from their SQL Server servers. One of these items is the SQL Server Native Client, aka SNAC, aka SQLNCLI, and I’m sure many others. I remember investigating the connections a very long time ago when availability groups first came around (2012) and haven’t looked at it since that time. A question on the database administrators stack exchange asked the question about if SNAC could be removed on a SQL Server 2019 instance used in high availability and my gut reaction was, “nope.” Gut reactions are great but not always correct, so I did a little testing.

Click through for the results of Sean’s testing.

Comments closed

First Thoughts on Azure Hyperscale Serverless

Reitse Eskens shares some thoughts:

As some of you know, I’ve written a series of blog posts on Azure SQL Databases and there’s an accompanying session that I had the honour of presenting a number of times.
Now Azure keeps developing new offers and one of these went in public preview February 15th. An offer I hadn’t seen coming. You can read the introductory post here.

It’s the Azure Hyperscale Serverless option.

Read on for Reitse’s impressions from the preview. This wasn’t a torture test but did provide an overview of how to create and load data into the database. Reitse also calculates the cutoff point when you should switch from Serverless to traditional Hyperscale, so check that out as well.

Comments closed

SQL Server 2022 CU1 and SQL Server 2019 CU19 Released

Srinivas Kandibanda and Harvey Mora have announcements:

The 1st cumulative update release for SQL Server 2022 RTM is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. Please note that registration is no longer required to download Cumulative updates.

Both of these came out several months later than expected, though with the big GDR that dropped yesterday, it seems like that cleared up the logjam.

Comments closed

Praise for Purvi’s List

Andy Yun is a fan:

By sheer coincidence, I had the privilege of being invited to a private SQL Server 2022 workshop taught by Bob Ward last week. And through my job, I also had the privilege of doing some testing work around QAT backups and S3 Data Virtualization during the private preview phase last summer. So while I had exposure and access to SQL Server 2022 for much longer than others, there were many things that Microsoft loaded into the 2022 release that I barely skimmed over or knew were even there.

Towards the end of the workshop, Bob presented a slide called Purvi’s List. Purvi Shah is an engineer on the SQL performance team and as Bob said, “spends her time finding ways to make SQL Server and Azure SQL faster.”

Read on to learn what had Andy so excited.

Comments closed

Degree of Parallelism Feedback

Deborah Melkin looks at a nice feature in SQL Server 2022:

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my initial thoughts to SQL Server 2022. I think a lot of what I wrote still holds true. It feels like it’s building on the functionality from previous versions, especially when it comes to Intelligent Query Processing and its feedback capabilities.

The feature I’m most curious to find out more about is the Degree of Parallelism Feedback. (You can read more about it here.) One of the main reasons for this is I know very little about the settings.

Read on for Deb’s thoughts and a situation where it would have helped.

Comments closed

Plan Explorer Integration in SSMS 19

Andy Yun does us a solid:

If you’re like me, Plan Explorer has always been a must-have tool in your performance tuning arsenal. And one of the things that made it so useful was a simple little SSMS Integration that would allow you to right click on an Execution Plan and see “View with […] Plan Explorer.” 

Unfortunately, I started hearing reports of that no longer being available in SSMS v19. But I know a thing or two, so was willing to bet 30 minutes of time that I could get it back.

Andy won that bet, so shower him with accolades.

1 Comment

Flink 1.16.1 Release

Martijn Visser announces Apache Flink version 1.16.1:

The Apache Flink Community is pleased to announce the first bug fix release of the Flink 1.16 series.

This release includes 84 bug fixes, vulnerability fixes, and minor improvements for Flink 1.16. Below you will find a list of all bugfixes and improvements (excluding improvements to the build infrastructure and build stability). For a complete list of all changes see: JIRA.

We highly recommend all users upgrade to Flink 1.16.1.

Read on for the release notes, including links to all of the closed tickets.

Comments closed