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Category: Versions

Updates in R 4.4.0

Published 2024-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Russ Hyde shares items of interest:

R 4.4.0 (“Puppy Cup”) was released on the 24th April 2024 and it is a beauty. In time-honoured tradition, here we summarise some of the changes that caught our eyes. R 4.4.0 introduces some cool features (one of which is experimental) and makes one of our favourite {rlang} operators available in base R. There are a few things you might need to be aware of regarding handling NULL and complex values.

The full changelog can be found at the r-release ‘NEWS’ page and if you want to keep up to date with developments in base R, have a look at the r-devel ‘NEWS’ page.

Read on for a big note on tail-call recursion, an operator for coalescing, and a few more neat features.

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Updates to Open-Source Procedures sp_QuickieStore, etc.

Published 2024-04-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has been busy:

Let’s start with giving some credit, here, since I hate an overdue bill.

ReeceGoding reported and very capably fixed an issue with sp_QuickieStore. The problem only occurred when you ran the procedure with @get_all_databases and the new @escape_brackets parameter set to true. Each loop would add an escape character to the search string, which could end up looking like this: %\\\\\[AnyStringStartingAndEndingWithSquareBrackets]\\\\\]%'

That’s a fix in place, and you can also see updates to sp_HealthParser and sp_PressureDetector.

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SSMS 20 and Mandatory Connection Security

Published 2024-03-29 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan hits an annoyance:

I tried to run a new query for a CMS but the query window opened as disconnected. If I selected one server out of the group and tried to open a new query, I received an error that “A connection was successfully established with the server, but then an error occurred during the login process.”

That can get really annoying if you have a few hundred instances in your Central Management Server. They’d all go away if you set up certificates for the servers, but until then, it would be a major annoyance.

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What’s New in SSMS 20

Published 2024-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato gives us the skinny:

We expect that the first two posts, combined with the release notes and the new Connect with SQL Server Management Studio page, provide the details you need about the changes in SSMS 20 GA.  As such, the focus of this post is the roadmap for SSMS.  Our roadmap is heavily influenced by the evolving capabilities of SQL Server and Azure SQL, and feedback from SSMS users.  We’re currently collecting general feedback at https://aka.ms/sqlfeedback, and feedback on Copilot in SSMS at https://aka.ms/ssms-copilot-feedback.  Please comment and upvote on items that you would like to see in SSMS!

With SSMS 20 now being generally available, you can download it and try it out in your own environment. Erin quells any fears that Microsoft is abandoning SSMS and covers some of the big-ticket items on the roadmap.

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Azure Data Studio 1.48 Now Available

Published 2024-02-29 by Kevin Feasel

David Levy gives us the latest:

The February release of Azure Data Studio (version 1.48) includes several new features and enhancements, such as:

  • Support for restores from URLs, including S3-compatible storage, via the restore dialog
  • Query Editor now includes SPIDs in tab titles
  • You can now specify a connection when launching ADS from the command line
  • You can now enable Ledger when creating a database in the Create Database dialog

Read on for more about each of these topics.

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Apache Kafka 3.7 Released

Published 2024-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Stanislav Kozlovski makes an announcement:

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 3.7.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent features. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

See the Upgrading to 3.7.0 from any version 0.8.x through 3.6.x section in the documentation for the list of notable changes and detailed upgrade steps.

Read on to see what’s new. Looks like they’ve taken care of a couple dozen items in this release, so plenty to read there.

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Installing or Upgrading SQL Server on a Workstation

Published 2024-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand shares some advice:

Lately, I’ve seen many people struggling to upgrade their workstation to the latest version of SQL Server. The main source of the problem is usually the web installer/wrapper, which can fail for a variety of reasons that aren’t always made clear by the error messages. Today, I’m going to walk through one way you can approach a workstation upgrade and avoid these web installer issues altogether. I’ll focus on SQL Server 2022, but most of the information applies to any modern major version. Most of the information applies if you’re installing a brand-new instance, too.

Click through for several good tips and practices.

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Azure SQL DB Serverless for Hyperscale now GA

Published 2024-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Morgan Oslake has an announcement:

Optimizing resource allocation to achieve performance goals while controlling costs can be a challenging balance to strike especially for database workloads with complex usage patterns.  Azure SQL Database serverless provides a solution to help address these challenges, but until now the general availability of serverless has only been available in the General Purpose tier.  However, many workloads that can benefit from serverless may require greater performance and scale along with other capabilities unique to the Hyperscale tier.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of serverless auto-scaling for Hyperscale in Azure SQL Database.  The benefits of serverless and Hyperscale now come together into a single database solution.

Read on to see what this means for you and how it can change the billing strategy around Hyperscale.

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SQL Server Versions: ConstantCare Winter 2023 Update

Published 2024-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar performs an implicit survey:

The short story: SQL Server 2019 continues its utter domination of the Microsoft data platform landscape this quarter.

The long story: ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates? Let’s find out in the winter 2023 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.

Click through to see the results for Brent’s sample of data.

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