Versions – Curated SQL

SQL ConstantCare Report for Spring 2026

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2026-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2026-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

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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Extended Support for SQL Server 2016 Ending

Published 2026-04-15 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has a public service announcement:

On July 14, 2026, Microsoft’s extended support ends for SQL Server 2016.

They will offer Extended Security Updates that you can buy for 3 more years, either through Azure or your licensing partner. The price is stunning:

Click through for the prices of extended security updates, as well as some thoughts I generally agree with regarding the importance of staying reasonably up to date on SQL Server versions.

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What’s New in SQL Server 2025 CU2

Published 2026-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis keeps track:

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.

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What’s New in SSIS 2025

Published 2026-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Koen 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.

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Fast Failover in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

John 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.

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Lock after Qualification in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo 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.

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Backup Updates in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

AK 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.

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Changing SQL Server on Linux Editions

Published 2026-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad 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.

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