A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Steve Jones wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:
Last week I asked you to write about SQL Server 2025 and what things you might be looking forward to in the new version.
Read on for seven entries from some of the more frequent T-SQL Tuesday contributors. Which doesn’t include me, because I am a slacker.
Leave a CommentRandolph West shares some notes:
We Apple product folks have been through a journey with the Microsoft data platform and Arm64 support, haven’t we? When the M1-based Apple silicon laptops were released, we couldn’t run Windows x64 in a virtual machine at all. Then Parallels managed to get a build of Windows 11 Arm64 going, but that meant we couldn’t run SQL Server … reliably, anyway. Some versions could install sometimes, but it was unpredictable.
It looks like neither product runs perfectly, but they both work better than I expected.
Leave a CommentThe November 2025 Fabric release introduces several major updates, including the general availability of SQL database, Cosmos DB, and enhanced mirroring support for key data sources such as SQL Server, Cosmos DB, and PostgreSQL.
This month also brings new AI-driven features like Copilot sidecar chat tools and real-time data exploration, as well as crucial platform enhancements such as Azure DevOps cross-tenant support, improved security permissions in OneLake, and expanded connectivity through new connectors and developer tooling. These updates are designed to empower users with greater flexibility, intelligence, and control across the Fabric platform.
When the table of contents is roughly three pages, you know it’s either Ignite or Build.
Leave a CommentAnna Hoffman and Idris Motiwala make an announcement:
SQL is everywhere and Microsoft is innovating to deliver a unified experience across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS. One SQL unifies your data estate, bringing platform consistency, performance at scale, advanced security, and AI-ready tools together in one seamless experience, and SQL database in Fabric is no exception to that. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re thrilled to announce SQL database in Microsoft Fabric is officially Generally Available!
This is definitely a fluffy post, though Anna does have some linked videos that go into more detail.
Leave a CommentA quick roundup on some big news from Microsoft Ignite.
John Deardurff hits the marketing materials:
The wait is over! SQL Server 2025 is officially here, and it’s more than just another version. I’ve been working with it during the last six months it was in public preview, and some of the features announced still surprised me. Let’s break down what makes this release so exciting and why it’s a game-changer for businesses and developers alike.
Andy Yun is pleased that Standard Edition just got a lot more powerful:
While all of the new features and such were available during Public Preview, one thing that was not public until now is that Standard Edition limits have been increased! Yay! The CPU core count limit is now 32 cores (or 4 sockets, whichever is lesser) and the max buffer pool memory per instance is now 256GB! Additionally, Resource Governor is now available for Standard Edition. And in SQL Server 2025, Resource Governor can also help you manage TempDB!
Reitse Eskens goes into several useful features, including Express Edition love:
You may have seen earlier blogs from me on SQL Server 2025; I won’t repeat that content in full, but I’ll provide a brief summary. You can find the full blogs here.
Something I wasn’t able to mention before, but you can now find in the documentation, is that SQL Server Express has upgraded its game! No longer a limit of 10 GB for the database, but 50 GB. This makes it much more useful in many scenarios.
Brent Ozar lays out a bunch of features as well:
1 CommentIf you use columnstore indexes, 2025 continues upon every release’s investments, with a bunch of improvements to make management easier on ordered indexes. In my early tests with clients, we’ve seen massive improvements in easier, faster, more online maintenance that we simply couldn’t do before.
Martin Stingl looks for some data:
I’m running a HomeAssistant instance at home. I’ve configured it to log data into an InfluxDB database, so I can retrieve historical data for analysis later on. In default mode HomeAssistant would aggregate historical data for storage reasons.
So now I want to access the InfluxDB database from R to perform custom analyses. HomeAssistant is still using InfluxDB version 1. To connect to InfluxDB from R, I thought I can use the
influxdbrpackage. But I got some errors because this package seems to be outdated.
Read on for the error message and how Martin was able to get around this. H/T R-Bloggers.
Leave a CommentJoe Sack explains four important measures:
You type “3-bedroom townhouse near a good school” into a home search site. It shows 10 homes. Some perfect, some okay, some wrong. How do you know if it’s working?
Four numbers help with this: Precision (what proportion is relevant), Recall (what you missed), MRR (how far to the first relevant result), nDCG (best stuff first).
Read on to learn what each one means and how it applies to vector search.
Leave a CommentI wasn’t really planning on writing a blog post today, but I got curios if there’s anyway in which connections saved in SQL Server Management Studio 21 can be migrated in SSMS 22.
If you’ve installed SQL Server Management Studio 22 you may have noticed that the saved connection details weren’t migrated over from SSMS 21.
It’s documented in the list of known issues for SSMS 22 and marked as having no workaround.
Vlad builds a workaround, probably wearing a lab coat and fiddling with Bunsen burners and beakers full of oddly-colored liquids.
Leave a CommentJon Vöge wants to write multiple records at a time:
Having presented a few sessions on Translytical Task Flows at conferences in the past moths, there is one major recurring question:
How do you write-back multiple records at once?
If you ask me, the questions of bulk write-back/writing back multiple records at once can be understood as two separate user stories, which sound similar, but are technically different:
Click through for those two questions as well as the answer to the first.
Leave a CommentBrendan Tierney generates some artificial data:
A some point everyone needs some test data for their database. There area a number of ways of doing this, and in this post I’ll walk through using the Python library Faker to create some dummy test data (that kind of looks real) in my Oracle Database. I’ll have another post using the GenAI in-database feature available in the Oracle Autonomous Database. So keep an eye out for that.
Faker is one of the available libraries in Python for creating dummy/test data that kind of looks realistic.
Brendan generates some demo customer data, including an example of credit rating that allows for assignment of probability for each class.
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