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Category: Versions

What’s New in SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.1

Published 2025-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar looks under the covers:

When CTP 2.0 came out, I blogged the thousands of new feature flags, messages, and system objects in SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0, and I haven’t had the time to dig more deeply into those yet. In that post, I discussed the new sys.dm_feature_switches table, and I mentioned that it might disappear before release. Indeed it has – last week’s new CTP 2.1 removed access to that table, meaning that was probably our one-time shot to get a glimpse into something cool and undocumented. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when folks at Microsoft read my blog post and realized they’d left that table unguarded and publicly visible, hahaha. I love my job.

So now CTP 2.1 is out, and it comes with a few things I think you’re going to be interested in.

Read on to see what Brent has found.

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What’s New for Columnstore Indexes in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-07-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Pollack gives us the lowdown:

Columnstore indexes are a powerful tool for storing analytic data directly in SQL Server. This feature has improved in every version of SQL Server since their inception over ten years ago, and SQL Server 2025 is no exception! 

The newest enhancements are laser-focused on business continuity and performance. Ordered clustered columnstore indexes, ordered non-clustered columnstore indexes, and database/file shrink operations are all given significant boosts that are worth the time to introduce and learn. 

In this article we will dive into each of these changes, how they impact columnstore workloads in SQL Server, and demonstrate their operation. 

Read on to see what we’ve got. Nothing in here is ground-breaking, but it’s a set of nice quality of life improvements.

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Changes to Accelerated Database Recovery in 2025

Published 2025-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich points out something interesting coming in SQL Server 2025:

Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) was introduced in SQL Server 2019. Its main purpose is to allow for faster database recovery in the event of a crash or unexpected shutdown. Traditionally, the database engine handles crash recovery through a series of phases—analysis, redo, and undo—which can be inefficient and slow, especially when dealing with long-running transactions.

To make a long story short, ADR “shortcutsˮ the recovery process by introducing a new approach to handling undo operations. Instead of relying heavily on scanning the transaction log—which can be painfully slow for uncommitted or long-running transactions—ADR maintains a version store within the user database to track row-level changes. This allows SQL Server to quickly roll back uncommitted transactions without scanning the entire log. The result is much faster crash recovery, quicker rollbacks, and improved overall database availability, particularly in high-transaction environments.

Read on to see what’s new, as well as some of the consequences of enabling this feature.

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Comparing OrioleDB and Neon

Published 2025-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Alexander Korotkov reminds us that there are a lot of data platform products out there:

In a recent Hacker News discussion, there was some confusion about the differences between OrioleDB and Neon. Both look alike at first glance. Both promise a “next‑gen Postgres”. Both have support for cloud‑native storage.

This post explains how the two projects differ in practice. And importantly, OrioleDB is more than an undo log for PostgreSQL.

Alexander is the creator of OrioleDB, so price in any vendor bias you wish as you see the comparison of two up-and-coming technologies.

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Maintaining Statistics Information Post-Update in PostgreSQL 18

Published 2025-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Laurenz Albe takes a peek at an upcoming feature:

Everybody wants good performance. When it comes to the execution of SQL statements, accurate optimizer statistics are key. With the upcoming v18 release, PostgreSQL will preserve the optimizer statistics during an upgrade with dump/restore or pg_upgrade (see commit 1fd1bd8710 and following). With the beta testing season for PostgreSQL v18 opened, it is time to get acquainted with the new feature.

It’s kind of wild to me that this wasn’t in place years ago for PostgreSQL.

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Standard Developer Edition in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni explains why this is a big deal:

No, it’s not dark mode for SQL Server Management Studio, though the votes are probably close. (Note: I feel like I’m the only IT pro who doesn’t use dark mode, and it’s because I record/present so much—pro tip: you shouldn’t present in dark mode). It’s also not the enhancements to Always On Availability Groups, but you’ll read more about those either here or over at Redmond in the coming months. The most requested feature in SQL Server 2025 is Standard Developer Edition (which is an unfortunate name, but in my discussions with the product group, there just wasn’t anything better they could come up, and legal wouldn’t approve Standard McDatabaseyface).

My hot take is that I don’t use dark mode either. More people should just have proper task lighting when they’re working.

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Testing ZSTD Backup Compression in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand runs some tests:

Whether you are a bank or a hot dog stand, creating backups is a boring but essential part of managing databases. Compressing backups – like other types of data compression – can save time and storage space, at the usually unavoidable cost of CPU. There has been little change in compression throughout SQL Server’s long history, but this year, in SQL Server 2025, there is an exciting change coming.

This set of results from Aaron is a bit different from what we’ve seen from Andy Yun and Anthony Nocentino. That’s a big part of why it’s important to get several data points, and to do your own testing in your own environment with your own equipment.

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Resource Governor on TempDB in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Pollack takes a peak at some upcoming functionality:

TempDB is a system database in SQL Server that manages temporary objects for all databases on a server. Because it is a shared resource, it can easily become a performance bottleneck., as well as an opportunity for a single database or even a single query to wreck SQL Server performance.

Because of this, administrators will often give TempDB plenty of space and put its files on the fastest storage available. Even with these precautions, it is still possible for a TempDB-hungry workload to hog space and resources that result in latency or timeouts for end users.

SQL Server 2025 introduces the ability to use Resource Governor to help manage TempDB resources automatically. This article dives into the new feature, how to configure it, and how it can effectively manage TempDB-heavy workloads.

Ed starts with a primer on TempDB and Resource Governor functionality, then dives right in. It’s good to see some love for Resource Governor.

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SSMS 21 Extended Events Session Creation Bugfix

Published 2025-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey is happy:

I have a proper blog post coming out tomorrow for T-SQL Tuesday, but today, celebrate with me that SSMS 21 finally, at long last, fixes the irritating fact that the New Session window in SSMS for Extended Events always opened to the wrong size.

Click through for an example of the bug and how SSMS 21 fixes things. This type of bug is particularly pernicious because there aren’t scroll bars or any sort of indicator that some additional functionality exists, so unless you know that it’s there, you won’t know to look for it.

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