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Category: Versions

SQL Server 2019 Mainstream Support Ended

Published 2025-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones points out an important milestone:

Well, not really the end. I doubt anyone running SQL Server 2019 is going to stop (or upgrade) just because mainstream support ended. Actually, I wonder how many of you know that SQL Server 2019 passed out of mainstream support on Feb 28, 2025. I do think the 6 or 7 of you running Big Data Clusters likely knew this was the end of any support.

I saw a report in the Register on this, which includes a survey of which versions are still running. This is from an IT asset firm and matches Brent Ozar’s Population report. 44% of you are running SQL Server 2019, which is the largest percentage. Since there’s an additional 32% of you running versions older than 2019, I’m sure that upgrading isn’t a priority.

Given how there were some own-goals with SQL Server 2022, especially the earlier CUs of it, it’s not very surprising at all that the plurality of customers are still on 2019. Companies tend to follow an “every other release” strategy, so I’d expect some gradual migration to SQL Server 2025 after it comes out and a few CUs are in place.

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Reviewing Azure SQL DB Internals for Hints at SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar does some digging:

Microsoft staff used to say that Azure SQL DB is “the next version” of the boxed product, meaning that Microsoft tested, tweaked, and proved new features in the cloud while they could still rapidly iterate over code, shipping updates to make the product more reliable and scalable. In practice, that’s not entirely true: some things never leave the cloud, and some things actually ship to SQL Server long before they’re available up in Azure SQL DB.

Today, we’re going to go through documented & undocumented system objects that are available up in the cloud today (March 2025), but keep in mind that some of these may be cloud-only. I’m just dumping out the list of Azure SQL DB objects that aren’t present in SQL Server 2022 CU17.

Read on for those sets, with the caveat that not all of this may necessarily be in SQL Server 2025.

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Thoughts on a Decline in SQL Server Quality

Published 2025-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little shares her opinion:

“Is it just me, or is SQL Server quality slipping?”

I asked myself that question for couple/few years until I faced up to it: SQL Server is well into a period where Microsoft investment is waning, and Microsoft regularly isn’t able to deliver the features they promise.

Read on for Kendra’s take. I’m not in total agreement with this, though part of that is because my stance is closer to (if you’ll allow me the misappropriation of a famous quotation), there is a great deal of ruin in a data platform product.

But if I had a single line of demarcation to Kendra’s point, I’d probably make it when SQL Server QA shifted to “We’ll find all of the bugs in Azure SQL DB first, so we don’t need this redundancy” several years back. That doesn’t explain everything, but it does provide a relevant timeframe for all of this.

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Finding what Changed in a SQL Server Cumulative Update

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar does some sleuthing:

Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they’re going to lead to more information – but they simply lead back to themselves.

So whenever a new Cumulative Update drops at SQLServerUpdates.com, before I install it, I like to:

  1. Log my dev server’s list of current sys.all_objects, all_columns, messages, configurations, etc to tables
  2. Apply the update
  3. Query the new contents of sys.all_objects, all_columns, etc to see what new ones were added

Click through for a script that does just this. It’s not as good as having detailed patch notes, but it beats having nothing.

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Scraping SQL Server Version Updates

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards scrapes patch information:

(just for info, i’ve always refer to the SQL Server Version List (https://sqlserverbuilds.blogspot.com) as Blogspot for some reason)

Doesn’t take long, but it would be nice to not have to bother at all, and I don’t mean by moving everything to the cloud and let MS handle it either before anyone says it. 🙂

The details are just websites, so the html is just plain text, AND the awesome people who provide Blogspot also add the details to a publicly shared google doc, in multiple formats, legends.

So what can we do to make our lives even easier. How about downloading/scraping all of the details that you might ever need, and dropping them into tables somewhere? So when its in SQL, you can then choose to trigger off that however you like?

Read on to learn how.

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Error Code 0x851A0043 on SQL Server 2022 Updates

Published 2025-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Johnston runs into an error:

I’ve been working in the Azure space for the last few years and less with full server installations. Azure leaves file locations out of my control, but I recently had a client upgrading an on-prem server to SQL 2022.It was a fresh installation on a new VM. I installed SQL, restored all the data, then I moved files to their optimal locations. This was a fresh installation of SQL Server and I wanted to move all of the data files, log files and tempdb files to their own drives. I also wanted to move the system databases. The documentation cautions that cumulative updates (CU) could fail if a specific registry key isn’t updated after moving the master files, so I wanted to test this before I spent too much time configuring the server.

An excerpt of that warning follows here.

Click through for the warning, as well as how to fix the problem.

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The 8 Worst Things Microsoft Did with SQL Server

Published 2025-02-17 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has a list:

Last week I wrote about the 6 best things Microsoft ever did to SQL Server, but now we gotta pull up a chair and discuss the stinkers.

To be fair, I excluded anything that’s basically ANSI standard. I’m sorry that you don’t like functions and cursors, but the reality is that Microsoft adds that stuff because they have to. And honestly, I don’t have a problem with, say, functions or cursors – it’s Microsoft’s implementation of them in SQL Server that causes performance problems. They could write the engine in a way that was optimized for ’em – but they didn’t. Anyhoo, moving on.

I do disagree with number 8 (SQL Server on Linux), not because of using Linux per se, but rather because Microsoft parlayed that into SQL Server on containers. And Windows containers don’t count because they’re an abomination.

Looking through the list, there are fewer “I liked that…” things than I anticipated. I do tend toward the weird side of SQL Server, so I gravitate toward the misfit toys of PolyBase, ML Services, and the like.

As for Big Data Clusters, that was close to but not quite what I really want: scale-out in SQL Server with better ability to control what data we cache. It didn’t quite hit the mark, but I do appreciate them trying.

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SQL Server Migration via Distributed AG

Published 2025-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler makes a move:

Because it doesn’t require a common cluster, a distributed availability group allows us to link servers in situations were a cluster isn’t possible. Servers could be in remote locations, members or different domains, different OS levels or even different operating systems (yes, we can link Windows and Linux based AGs).

The ability to link servers in this way gives us a very nice and easy way to replicate data between servers when thinking about a migration.

David’s scenario involves a SQL Server upgrade. I’ve seen this work really well in practice for a 2017 to 2019 upgrade. With applications pointing to the listener agent and everything in place, you can have as little as a few seconds of downtime for that upgrade, which is amazing when you think about how we’ve historically migrated to new versions of SQL Server.

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Top 6 Things Microsoft Ever Did to SQL Server

Published 2025-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has a list:

This entire blog post is driven by the #1 feature in this list. I think about the #1 feature a lot, like at least once a week. I think about it so much that I had to stop and think about what other similar great things Microsoft has done over the years, and be thankful for what a nice platform this is to work with. Let’s go through 6 of my favorite Microsoft decisions.

I have to warn you: some of my takes are weird.

English Query was definitely an idea before its time. It was a great idea that I’m sure demoed well (though that was before I got into SQL Server, so can’t tell you from personal experience), but it was dog slow.

Read on for the rest of the list. Admittedly, sometimes I wish Microsoft had gone through on its deprecation notice around statements not ending in a semi-colon, just to watch the world burn.

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