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Category: Versions

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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Installing Older PowerShell Modules with Dependencies

Published 2025-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Levy needs an older version of dbatools:

I don’t recall where this came up (probably in SQLSlack), but I had a need to install an older version of dbatools to test something related to loading the dbatools.library library/dependency.

Read on to see how Install-Module won’t quite cut it because it doesn’t bring in the older versions of dependencies. But there is an alternative.

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Installing SQL Server 2025 RC0 on an Azure VM

Published 2025-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck performs an installation:

I already had a virtual machine in Azure, running SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0 (which uses a pre-made image). I explain how to set that one up in the article Install SQL Server 2025 Demo Environment in Azure. But I wanted to use the latest preview, which is Release Candidate 0 at the time of writing. Unfortunately, there’s no image available (yet?), so I had to do it the old-school way: installing SQL Server manually.

Read on to see how to do it, as well as a few extra things necessary to make everything work well in Azure.

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Trying Time-Bound Extended Events in SQL Server 2025 RC0

Published 2025-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens check the state of the art:

What’s new in SQL 2025 is that the team behind SQL Server 2025 has addressed an issue that I’ve encountered once or twice as well. If you start an extended event, it will run until you stop it. Yes, you have to manually stop it. If you don’t, it will stop eventually. Together with some other services, because the disk space has run out. In my case, I was fortunate that the servers were monitored and alerts were triggered due to low disk space.

In this new version, starting with Release Candidate 0 (RC0), you can configure the duration.

Click through for a demo, as well as current limitations (generally around this not being in the UI yet).

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SQL Server 2025 RC0 Now Available

Published 2025-08-25 by Kevin Feasel

Priya Sathy has an announcement:

The first release candidate (RC0) of SQL Server 2025 is now available. As we move toward general availability, our focus shifts to delivering enhanced stability, performance, and product improvements based on your feedback.  

There are a few new features that Priya specifies in the post, so check those out. This also puts us on track for a GA delivery right around conference season.

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Pattern Matching with REGEXP_LIKE() in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck writes a regular expression:

I need to do some data validation in our SQL Server database. However, the validation rules are too complex for the T-SQL LIKE function, and I can’t seem to get it done either with PATINDEX or something similar. I’d like to use regular expressions as they’re more powerful. SQL Server 2025 now has a regex function regexep_like to use regular expressions.

Read on for some examples, advice on validating e-mail addresses, and more.

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SSMS 21 and the Visual Studio Installer

Published 2025-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West clears up a few misconceptions about SQL Server Management Studio 21’s installer:

There’s been some confusion lately about the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installation process for version 21.

Before Microsoft released SSMS 21, you had to download an installer file for each release (ever since SSMS was released as a standalone product with v16). This file eventually grew to be over 1GB, which is a significant download, especially in the case of a minor update.

With SSMS 21, Microsoft changed SSMS to use the Visual Studio installer. 

Read on to learn more about the ramifications of this decision. And there is still a way to install SSMS 21 in a secure environment without outbound internet access, although it does require a few more steps in addition to “download executable and then deploy executable to other machines.”

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