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Category: Versions

What’s New in R 4.5.0

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Russ Hyde checks out the changes:

R 4.5.0 (“How About a Twenty-Six”) was released on 11th April, 2025. Here we summarise some of the interesting changes that have been introduced. In previous blog posts we have discussed the new features introduced in R 4.4.0 and earlier versions (see the links at the end of this post).

The full changelog can be found at the r-release ‘NEWS’ page and if you want to keep up to date with developments in base R, have a look at the r-devel ‘NEWS’ page.

There are some nice bits of functionality on the list, so check it out.

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Working around Errors Migrating to Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2025-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Johnston has an after-action report:

I was recently on a project to migrate a very transactional installation of SQL Server to Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI). SQL Managed Instance is a good stepping stone between a full, on-prem SQL instance / Azure VM and an Azure SQL Database. It has most of the functionality of a full, on-prem instance, with management of the SQL engine, backups, OS and underlying hardware done by Microsoft. It allows you to use cross database queries and run SQL Agent jobs, with fewer limitations than Azure SQL Database migrations.

The migration process isn’t completely seamless. During the migration of this system, we encountered several surprises. Hopefully, this will help you avoid, or at least be prepared for these differences from the on-prem version. This also reinforces the importance of testing each aspect of your migration.

This is part one of a two-parter and focuses on issues during the deployment process. Ben promises a follow-up with post-deployment issues you could run into. I expect that’s where the “What is this performance?” issues will come into play.

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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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