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Month: November 2025

Querying JSON Quickly in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar follows up on yesterday’s post:

SQL Server 2025 and .NET 10 bring several new improvements to storing JSON natively in the database and querying it quickly.

On the SQL Server 2025 side, the two big ones are the new native JSON indexes and the new JSON_CONTAINS function. Let’s see their improvements in action. On the .NET 10 side, EF 10 not only supports the new JSON data type, but on databases of compatibility level 170 or higher, EF will automatically migrate JSON data from NVARCHAR(MAX) data types over to JSON the next time you do a migration, as explained in the What’s New in EF Core 10 doc. That makes it especially important for you to understand how the new JSON indexes work, because they may be coming at you quickly the instant you change your compatibility level.

Read on to see Brent’s take.

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Cutting Costs of Azure Self-Hosted Integration Runtimes

Published 2025-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword saves some quid:

If you have a Self-Hosted Integration Runtime (SHIR, or IR for short here) on an Azure Virtual Machine (VM), there’s a cost to keep it online. When used intermittently – for example during batch processes – this is inefficient for costs as you’re paying for the compute you don’t need. One way to alleviate this is by controlling uptime of the environment manually, only bringing it online for as long as needed.

Read on to see how to do this.

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SSMS 22 now Generally Available

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff shares the news:

Microsoft has announced that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22 is now generally available! This latest release brings powerful new capabilities to enhance your SQL Server experience:

Click through to see what’s new and see the original Microsoft blog post on the topic. One thing to note is that the query hint recommendation tool is still in preview, so you do need to select it as an individual component to install.

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Running SQL Server in a Local Container via VSCode

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Eduardo Pivaral uses the MSSQL extension in Visual Studio Code:

You are a developer using SQL Server for your applications, and you need to quickly setup a local development environment. How can you make sure the environment is OS agnostic, so it can run on any operating system? Let’s see how we can quickly create a local container to run SQL Server using the VSCode MSSQL Extension.

Read on for the instructions. I still do the old-fashioned thing of opening up a terminal window and running docker commands, but this is pretty convenient.

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Changes to Backups in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones notes one interesting change to backups in SQL Server 2025:

I’ve been a DBA (or Ops manager) for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things I’ve thought was top priority was backups. I always want to be sure I have a recovery strategy, because if I don’t, nothing matters. Things go wrong and systems fail and I need to protect systems.

Security is a close second, but backups really matter.

Something else backup-related that Steve doesn’t mention is the new form of backup compression using ZSTD. Initial testing of this has been fairly positive and I think it’s worth trying it out as well.

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Optimized Locking and Change Event Streaming in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Deb Melkin is looking forward to a pair of features:

When I look at this release, I feel like I’ve been more tuned into what’s coming out than any other. I’m still not sure how that happened. But I think overall it’s a good thing because there really is a lot being packed into this release. If you’re just trying to figure out now, you’re already behind.

There are really 2 features that I’m really excited about:

Read on to learn more about both of them.

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SQL Server Standard Developer Edition

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan is excited about a limitation:

I had written most of this blog post before seeing this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invite. I decided to hold off a few days to post because, while it’s no secret, I think it’s worth pointing out to those that may not know: before you spend time testing SQL Server 2025, make sure you consider what version of Developer Edition to use.

You may read that and ask, “What do you mean? Isn’t there only one Developer Edition?” That used to be the case, but not anymore.

Read on to see why this is important for a large number of companies.

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Using the trap Statement in Powershell

Published 2025-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer plays his trap card:

In PowerShell, error handling is a crucial aspect of writing robust and reliable scripts. One of the powerful features to manage errors gracefully is the trap statement. The trap statement allows you to define a block of code that runs whenever a terminating error occurs in your script. This can be particularly useful for logging errors, cleaning up resources. Let’s dive in.

Read on to see how it works. My preference would be to use try/catch blocks instead of trap statements, but it is interesting to see it there.

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