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Category: Versions

Migrating from PSCore 6 to PowerShell 7.5

Published 2025-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Bertram lays out what has changed:

You adopted PowerShell Core 6 early. You moved scripts to .NET Core. You dealt with the compatibility issues. Now Microsoft wants you to upgrade again.

Here’s why it matters: PowerShell Core 6 is no longer supported. Your scripts still run, but you’re missing security patches, performance improvements, and features that make PowerShell 7.5 worth the upgrade.

The good news? Moving from Core 6 to 7.5 is easier than the jump from Windows PowerShell. Most scripts work unchanged. But “most” isn’t “all,” and the differences matter.

Read on to see what will break when moving from PowerShell Core 6 to PowerShell 7.5.

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SQL ConstantCare Population Report for Fall 2025

Published 2025-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has an update:

SQL Server 2022’s market share has remained pretty stable since its huge jump in Q1, when people replaced a lot of 2016 servers with 2022. With SQL Server 2025’s release approaching quickly, I’m not sure SQL Server 2022 will ever approach the amazing dominant streak that 2019 experienced – that thing’s been a monster! It’s held over 40% market share for two years straight now. 

Read on for Brent’s predictions around SQL Server 2025. I tend to agree with Brent’s conclusion around why adoption for 2025—assuming no unforeseen catastrophe in the product—will be more like what we saw with SQL Server 2016 or 2019 versus 2017 or 2022. Which is good, because 2022 and 2025 both have some nice additions to T-SQL that will make database developers’ lives easier.

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Installing SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition on Linux

Published 2025-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta tries out a new edition available in SQL Server 2025:

In the article “Install SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition,” we explored the installation of SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition on the Windows platform. SQL Server 2025 (Preview) also works on Linux editions, and it is equally important to cover the installation steps. Let’s see how we can install it on an AWS EC2 instance running Ubuntu.

The first half of the article covers spinning up an EC2 instance. Interestingly, the prompt to choose your edition of SQL Server was only partially updated—it still asks for you to choose an option between 1 and 10, but there are now 11 options available and I’m now curious if the conditional logic in the script to choose your edition works if you want to use Enterprise Core. Rajendra does note an error message that pops up around licensing, but that could be a release candidate thing.

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Breaking Changes in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis goes over the list:

Every new SQL Server release comes with shiny features — but SQL Server 2025 brings more than just enhancements. It’s important to know that there are several breaking changes under the hood that could futz your upgrade if you’re not paying attention.

On the whole, it’s a pretty small list but there are a few things on here that could affect any given environment.

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TempDB Resource Governor in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar tries out an update to resource governor:

We’ve finally got a way to defend ourselves. We can configure Resource Governor to divide people into groups (something that seems to be trendy lately), and then cap how much TempDB space each group can consume. You don’t even have to divide them into groups, either (take note, politicians) – you can just cap how much resources everyone can use altogether.

To keep things simple for the sake of this blog post, let’s just assume we’re limiting everyone’s usage altogether. 

Click through to see how it works, as well as some of the caveats that are going to require foresight before this works the way you’ll want it to.

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Migrating from Apache Airflow 2 to 3 on Amazon MWAA

Published 2025-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Anurag Srivastava, et al, perform a migration:

Apache Airflow 3.x on Amazon MWAA introduces architectural improvements such as API-based task execution that provides enhanced security and isolation. Other major updates include a redesigned UI for better user experience, scheduler-based backfills for improved performance, and support for Python 3.12. Unlike in-place minor Airflow version upgrades in Amazon MWAA, upgrading to Airflow 3 from Airflow 2 requires careful planning and execution through a migration approach due to fundamental breaking changes.

This migration presents an opportunity to embrace next-generation workflow orchestration capabilities while providing business continuity. However, it’s more than a simple upgrade. Organizations migrating to Airflow 3.x on Amazon MWAA must understand key breaking changes, including the removal of direct metadata database access from workers, deprecation of SubDAGs, changes to default scheduling behavior, and library dependency updates. This post provides best practices and a streamlined approach to successfully navigate this critical migration, providing minimal disruption to your mission-critical data pipelines while maximizing the enhanced capabilities of Airflow 3.

Read on to see what has changed between these two major versions of Airflow, recommendations on what to look out for, and a step-by-step migration guide.

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First Impressions of SSMS 22 Preview 1

Published 2025-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens tries out the new preview of SQL Server Management Studio 22:

We’re almost used to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21, and now 22 is already in preview. So, let’s see where it’s available for download, install it and see what’s different.

There’s not a huge amount of new functionality, and Reitse spends some time on the big one: that SSMS is moving from the Azure OpenAI integration that they introduced in SSMS 21 to a GitHub Copilot integration in 22, but it’s not in the preview just yet.

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Unicode Providers in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Vérité checks the version:

With three locale providers (libc, icu and builtin), a PostgreSQL instance has potentially three different versions of Unicode at the same time.

When doing only store/retrieve or basic operations on UTF-8 strings, these versions don’t matter. Postgres checks that the bytes in the strings constitute valid UTF-8 sequences, but not whether the code points corresponding to these sequences are assigned or not.

It starts to matter when interpreting these code points as characters.

Read on to see which features might determine which Unicode provider you might be using.

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SQL Server 2025 RC1 Released

Published 2025-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft has a new release candidate:

Currently SQL Server 2025 (17.x) Preview includes features available through release candidate (RC) 1.

In addition to features announced previously, RC 1:

  • Fixes known issues that were present in previous preview releases.
  • Introduces feature improvements.

Click through for the changes. There aren’t a huge number of updates in this candidate, and it came out a bit quicker than I thought it would, with RC0 dropping on August 25th. Given that Ignite isn’t until November 18th, that does still give a fair amount of time for an RC2 to come out, and it’ll be interesting to see if they go that long or release SQL Server 2025 RTM earlier than Ignite.

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