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Category: Versions

SQL Server on Azure Local Now GA

Raj Pochiraju announces a product:

Some of the world’s most critical databases run in places where cloud connectivity cannot be assumed. A remote industrial site, for example, may need production systems to continue operating when external connectivity is unavailable. A regulated organization may need sensitive data and processing to remain within sovereign boundaries.

Today, SQL Server on Azure Local is generally available for connected and disconnected operations. With this release, customers can modernize where their data resides while maintaining control over infrastructure, connectivity, and data placement. They can bring AI closer to their data with Foundry Local on Azure Local, currently in preview, and use eligible existing SQL Server licensing investments.

Azure Local is rather limiting in terms of the available hardware, though there are specific environments that I think could be well-suited for this.

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Delays on Postgres 19

Elizabeth Garrett Christensen digs into some details:

Postgres 19 won’t make the expected release date. PostgreSQL has shipped its major version every fall for the last several years. But this year, the code is in a heavy review cycle, major features have been reverted during beta, and many others are under heavy revision. Beta 4 is scheduled for Sept. 24, 2026. A release of Postgres 19 is certainly delayed by weeks and maybe even months.

Postgres 19 was an ambitious release already, with a lot of large features. With any project, you have to choose priorities. For Postgres, the priorities were quality, followed by shipping within the time window. The team is reducing the scope of the release to get closer to meeting its timeline with the quality it requires.

We can see that Postgres 19 is a rather ambitious release, and Elizabeth includes a list of things that might not make it immediately.

Christophe Pettus also provides some historical context:

PostgreSQL 18 had its first release candidate on September 4, 2025, and went GA three weeks later. As I write this, on September 14, 2026, PostgreSQL 19 has no release candidate date. It has a fourth beta scheduled for September 24, a commit freeze for that beta on September 19, and a stated goal of GA “by the end of October.” In the last three weeks it has lost two of the features that headlined every “what’s new in 19” post written since June, including mine. On August 31, Bruce Momjian wrote on -hackers that “it feels we are in an unprecedented situation here.” A week later, Joshua Drake proposed moving the release to spring 2027. Nobody took him up on it. Nobody laughed, either.

This is not a “PostgreSQL is falling apart” post. The project reverts things late every year; the PostgreSQL 11 cycle had a scariest-patch tournament of its own, and WAIT FOR took a decade and three reverts to land. But 19 is different in degree.

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What Comes Next for SQL Server 2016

Debbi Lyons lays it out:

As of today, July 14, 2026, SQL Server 2016 has reached end of support.

For the past decade, SQL Server 2016 has helped organizations run mission-critical applications and support the data needs of their business. Whether it was end-to-end encryption with Always Encrypted or performance improvements with In-Memory OLTP, SQL Server 2016 was shaped by evolving data platform needs and what we heard directly from customers like you.

Last year, we shared guidance on how to prepare for this milestone: Protect and modernize SQL Server 2016 workloads with Microsoft. Now, after 10 years of powering innovation, the focus shifts to what comes next.

It basically comes down to “Pay Microsoft a lot more money for one-off security fixes or upgrade to a version that isn’t a decade old.”

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Master Database Compatibility Level

Jeff Iannucci explains an issue:

We were attempting to install a troubleshooting stored procedure in the master database of a SQL Server 2016 instance when we received the following error.

Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Procedure sp_ShootTheTrouble, Line 227 [Batch Start Line 7]

‘TRY_CONVERT’ is not a recognized built-in function name.

This was unexpected, as TRY_CONVERT has been a command since SQL Server 2012. As a consequence, we were unable to install the stored procedure.

Tracking system database compatibility levels is a minor chore but an important one after an upgrade.

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Deprecated SQL Server Features since 2016

Jeff Iannucci has a list:

If you’re planning on upgrading from SQL Server 2016 to the current version of SQL Server 2025, it would be helpful to note some of the features from versions since 2016 that are no longer supported. By that I’m talking about those things classified as “deprecated” (no longer supported) or “discontinued” (removed from the product). Let’s take a look at these features and say our goodbyes, organized by versions.

There’s not a lot on here that would affect most companies. Though to one of Jeff’s points in the article, I actually have seen a company use lightweight pooling, mostly because they didn’t know what it did and saw the bit about how it could improve performance. I came in and flipped that switch off for them. That was the kind of feature that likely benefited one or two large customers 30 years ago or so and it just hung around in the product due to inertia.

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Full-Text Indexes and SQL Server 2025

Rich Benner rebuilds indexes:

The Full-Text Engine manages full-text indexes. The engine splits your text columns into individual terms and builds an inverted index, mapping each term back to the rows in which it appears. Unlike a standard B-tree index, the structure lives outside the normal index internals and is maintained asynchronously via a background process called a crawl. Effectively, each word in your text string ends up indexed, rather than the string as a whole. This makes certain types of searches much more efficient (you need to use search terms like CONTAINS() to utilize full text indexes).

If you have to search strings like this then full-text indexes can be very effective. String searching isn’t great in SQL Server, but this is definitely a tool in your belt if you have a requirement that makes it useful.

Because of some changes to the way full-text indexing works in SQL Server 2025, there is a post-upgrade maintenance task you’ll have to perform.

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What’s New in Cassandra 6

Mariah McLaughlin lays out some of the new features in the latest version of Cassandra:

Accord is a general-purpose transaction framework that uses a leaderless consensus protocol to have highly available transactions and is used in Cassandra 6. The goal is broader transactional support across multiple keys, with strict serializable isolation and without a central bottleneck.

This matters because multi-key consistency is hard to handle cleanly in application code. Once a workflow spans more than one partition, the application often ends up doing coordination work that really belongs in the database.

Accord enables ACID behavior on transactional tables, which lets developers coordinate multi-step, multi-partition changes with stronger correctness guarantees, reducing the amount of custom consistency logic they have to build in the application.

Click through for more information on this, as well as a few other significant features.

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SQL ConstantCare Report for Spring 2026

Brent Ozar provides an update:

SQL Server 2025’s 1% adoption rate might sound small, but it mirrors the adoption rate curves of 2019 and 2022 when those releases came out. It took 2019 a year to break 10% adoption, and it took 2022 a year and a half. I’ve grouped together 2014 & prior versions because they’re all unsupported, and 2016 will join them quickly in July when it goes out of extended support. (I can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years already!) Here’s how adoption is trending over time, with the most recent data at the right:

Standard statements about how this is a biased (in the statistical sense) sample apply. Standard statements about how I am appreciative that Brent shares this information because I don’t know of anyone else who consistently does give out this level of info also apply.

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What’s New in Kafka 4.1.0

Paul Brebner has a list:

Since then, Kafka 4.1.0 was released (September 2025, see detailed release notes), with around 472 Kafka Improvement (KIPs), including new features, improvements, bug fixes, tests, and more—well done to the Apache Kafka open source community! Kafka 4.1.1 (a bugfix release) was made available on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform in December 2025.

So, what’s changed from 4.0 to 4.1.0? What are the most interesting improvements (for me at least)? In this blog, we focus on a new improvement, the Streams Rebalance Protocol.

Click through for that list.

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What’s New in R 4.6.0

Russ Hyde has a summary:

R 4.6.0 (“Because it was There”) is set for release on April 24th 2026. Here we summarise some of the more interesting changes that have been introduced. In previous blog posts, we have discussed the new features introduced in R 4.5.0 and earlier versions (see the links at the end of this post).

Once R 4.6.0 is released, the full changelog will be available at the r-release ‘NEWS’ page. If you want to keep up to date with developments in base R, have a look at the r-devel ‘NEWS’ page.

Click through for the highlights.

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