Versions – Curated SQL

Deprecated SQL Server Features since 2016

Published 2026-06-12 by Kevin Feasel

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.

Full-Text Indexes and SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-05-27 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2026-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

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

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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Category: Versions