A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
SQL Server 2025 CU2 released on February 12, 2026. Build 17.0.4015.4, six fixes. I’ve been running 2025 since RTM, and have been watching things pretty closely — looking for fixes, what to flag for clients, and what’s still sitting in the ‘known issues’ category, pending correction.
Here’s the short version.
Click through for that short version.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck actually gets an article’s length out of this:
There’s a new version of SQL Server released and we’re mainly an on-premises SQL Server shop. We’ve been using Integration Services (SSIS) for years now for all our ETL and data integration needs. With Microsoft’s focus on cloud (Azure and Fabric), does it make sense to upgrade our SSIS packages? Are there any new features?
Click through for the answer, though “stuff that’s gone away” or “stuff that you have to change because of drivers” make up almost 100% of this.
Leave a CommentJohn Deardurff lays out some changes in SQL Server 2025:
A client requested a presentation discussing key improvements to Always On Availability Group fast failover in SQL Server 2025. I decided that a summary would be appropriate for a blog post. So, here I discuss Enhanced Telemetry, Persistent Health, and Intelligent Fast Failover
John has a very positive take on fast failover. I haven’t tried any of this functionality, but some of this does sound promising.
Leave a CommentHugo Kornelis has a new video:
One of these two features is Lock After Qualification (LAQ). This feature avoids the scenario where a delete or update is blocked by a locked row that would not qualify. But, like any good thing, there is a price. This video shows the feature, explains how it works, and shows some of the potentially undesired side effects.
Click through for the video.
Comments closedAK Gonzalez summaries some changes:
For years, database professionals faced a frustrating limitation. With Availability Groups, you could offload some workloads to secondary replicas—but not your real backup strategy.Yes, you could run copy-only backups on a secondary. But true full backups? Differential backups that maintain the LSN chain? Those had to run on the primary replica, until now. SQL Server 2025 introduces the ability to run true full backups and true differential backups on secondary replicas.
Read on to see what this means. AK also looks at the change to ZSTD for backup compression and immutable backups in Azure Storage.
One thing I would want to warn anybody (or any company) looking into using immutable storage for backups is, Microsoft’s not joking about that immutability. That includes deleting them when you see what the bill is going to be. You can set retention polices to delete these automatically, but that’s the only way you’re getting rid of those old backups. And just because they’re old doesn’t mean you get charged less for the privilege of storing them off-site.
Comments closedVlad Drumea swaps the edition:
In this post I cover the steps required to change (downgrade or upgrade) the edition of a SQL Server instance running on Linux.
In my previous post I’ve went through the steps of installing SQL Server 2025 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
While the process is pretty straight-forward, there might be cases where someone can accidentally specify the wrong edition and only notice afterwards.Luckily, the edition can be changed with just a few commands.
It’d be neat if it worked the same way for Windows.
Comments closedAnthony Nocentino has an update:
Good news for anyone who’s been working around the AVX issue I wrote about in my previous post. Microsoft has fixed it in Cumulative Update 1 (CU1) for SQL Server 2025.
The downside is that CU1 broke other things like database mail, though I suppose you probably aren’t likely to use database mail on a containerized instance of SQL Server.
Comments closedBrent Ozar notes some problems:
SQL Server 2025 Cumulative Update 1 came out last week, and I was kinda confused by the release notes. They described a couple dozen fixed issues, and the list seemed really short for a CU1.
However, the more I dug into it, the weirder things got. For example, there were several new DMVs added – which is normally a pretty big deal, something to be celebrated in the release notes – but they weren’t mentioned in the release notes. One of the DMVs wasn’t even documented. So I didn’t blog to tell you about CU1, dear reader, because something about it seemed fishy.
Read on for a big deal.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand shares some lessons learned:
We recently upgraded multiple systems to SQL Server 2025. The engine upgrade itself was smooth, but three unexpected issues surfaced in our lower environments as we planned out production. None of these issues prevented the upgrade from completing, but all three could easily derail an otherwise smooth in-place upgrade to SQL Server 2025. What were these issues, and how can you avoid hitting them?
My biggest surprise out of this is that full-text search actually got upgraded.
Comments closedIt’s time for our quarterly update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server. In short, people are replacing SQL Server 2016 and 2017 with 2022!
I do think that 2025 will pick up steam. The marginal change was mostly into 2022, but 2025 wasn’t officially released until November and I’m guessing not many companies upgraded in December. I do think we’ll see some pickup of SQL Server 2025 in this quarter.
As always, this is my throat-clearing reminder that what Brent has is a biased sample of the SQL Server population and is not necessarily reflective of the population as a whole. It’s a very interesting sample upon which to reflect, but its specific bias is that it necessarily only includes customers of Brent Ozar’s service, which will be a specific subset of organizations.
Comments closed