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Category: Versions

SQL Server 2025 CU1 Woes

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Brent 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.

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Lessons Learned in a SQL Server 2025 Upgrade

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron 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.

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SQL ConstantCare Population Report for Q4 2025

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has an update:

It’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.

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Creating a SQL Server 2025 Practice Environment

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff installs SQL Server 2025:

Microsoft SQL Server 2025 introduces major advancements in performance, security, and built‑in AI capabilities. Before you can start exploring its new features, you need to install it correctly. This guide walks you through the full installation process of SQL Server 2025, SQL Server Management Studio 22, and restoring the AdventureWorks2025 database to create a practice environment to test the new features and enhancements of this new release.

I was going to joke, “But John, what about your loyal Linux-using readers? How can we do this?” But instead, I’ll say that I’m glad that AdventureWorks is still alive and kicking. It is, on the whole, a nice demo database.

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The Year in SQL

Published 2025-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Anna Hoffman writes up the year in SQL:

For the FIFTH(!!) year in a row (my heart is warm with the number, I love SQL and #SQLfamily, and time is flying), I am sharing my annual Year in Review blog with all the SQL Server, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric news this year. Of course, you can catch weekly episodes related to what’s new and diving deeper on the Azure SQL YouTube channel (this blog post was livestreamed there too). This year, in addition to Data Exposed (52 new episodes and over 70K views!), we saw many new series related to areas like GitHub Copilot, SSMS, VS Code, and Azure SQL Managed Instance land in the channel, in addition to Data Exposed.

Click through for plenty of links around SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, and Fabric SQL Database.

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Optional Parameter Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues looking at new functionality in SQL Server 2025:

Part of new features in IQP (Intelligent query processing) is also OPPO – Optional parameter plan optimization – which refers to a specific variation of the parameter-sensitive plan (PSP) or Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization (PSPO) problem in which the sensitive, parameter value that exists during query execution, controls whether we need to perform a seek into or scan a table. It is part of mitigating the parameter sniffing problem.

Read on for more information, as well as a demonstration of how it works.

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What’s New in SSIS for SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chunhua Gu says, not much:

Security is a top priority for SSIS 2025, reflecting the broader enterprise’s focus on data protection and compliance. Microsoft.Data.SqlClient provides a modern, secure data access layer. This new provider supports advanced security protocols, including TLS 1.3 for encrypted connections, and integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) for robust authentication.

In short, support the new-ish library (that has been around for several years), tie in with Microsoft Fabric, remove functionality that used to be in the product while spinning this as a grand new opportunity for developers to spend money on Fabric, and that’s it. Granted, SSIS hasn’t been a proper focus for the product since 2012 (sorry, Hadoop components in 2016—you’re out of the product now, so you don’t count), so all of this should come at no surprise.

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REST API Invocation in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-12 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues an advent of SQL Server 2025. First up is external REST API endpoint execution:

This new functionality, you can call to the system stored procedure sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, and call / get:

– Call REST/GraphQL endpoints from other Azure services
– Have data processed via an Azure Function
– Update a Power BI dashboard
– Call an on-premises REST endpoint
– Talk to Azure OpenAI services

Then, Tomaz uses this to call a language model:

After short introduction into the  sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint we will look into creating a REST endpoint for using LLM.

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Backups on Secondary Replicas in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-03 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan McCaffrey takes a look:

Back in 2022, I wrote a post called SQL Server Backups on Secondary Replicas: Best Practice or Bad Idea? At the time, the limitations were clear: backups on secondaries were restricted, operationally risky, and often misunderstood.

Three years later, SQL Server 2025 has expanded what you can do on a secondary replica. Some of these changes are genuinely great. But the question I keep getting is:

Does SQL Server 2025 finally make backups on secondary replicas a best practice?

Read on for the answer.

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