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Category: Versions

Praise for Purvi’s List

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun is a fan:

By sheer coincidence, I had the privilege of being invited to a private SQL Server 2022 workshop taught by Bob Ward last week. And through my job, I also had the privilege of doing some testing work around QAT backups and S3 Data Virtualization during the private preview phase last summer. So while I had exposure and access to SQL Server 2022 for much longer than others, there were many things that Microsoft loaded into the 2022 release that I barely skimmed over or knew were even there.

Towards the end of the workshop, Bob presented a slide called Purvi’s List. Purvi Shah is an engineer on the SQL performance team and as Bob said, “spends her time finding ways to make SQL Server and Azure SQL faster.”

Read on to learn what had Andy so excited.

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Degree of Parallelism Feedback

Published 2023-02-15 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin looks at a nice feature in SQL Server 2022:

A couple of months ago, I wrote about my initial thoughts to SQL Server 2022. I think a lot of what I wrote still holds true. It feels like it’s building on the functionality from previous versions, especially when it comes to Intelligent Query Processing and its feedback capabilities.

The feature I’m most curious to find out more about is the Degree of Parallelism Feedback. (You can read more about it here.) One of the main reasons for this is I know very little about the settings.

Read on for Deb’s thoughts and a situation where it would have helped.

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Plan Explorer Integration in SSMS 19

Published 2023-02-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Yun does us a solid:

If you’re like me, Plan Explorer has always been a must-have tool in your performance tuning arsenal. And one of the things that made it so useful was a simple little SSMS Integration that would allow you to right click on an Execution Plan and see “View with […] Plan Explorer.” 

Unfortunately, I started hearing reports of that no longer being available in SSMS v19. But I know a thing or two, so was willing to bet 30 minutes of time that I could get it back.

Andy won that bet, so shower him with accolades.

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Flink 1.16.1 Release

Published 2023-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Martijn Visser announces Apache Flink version 1.16.1:

The Apache Flink Community is pleased to announce the first bug fix release of the Flink 1.16 series.

This release includes 84 bug fixes, vulnerability fixes, and minor improvements for Flink 1.16. Below you will find a list of all bugfixes and improvements (excluding improvements to the build infrastructure and build stability). For a complete list of all changes see: JIRA.

We highly recommend all users upgrade to Flink 1.16.1.

Read on for the release notes, including links to all of the closed tickets.

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SSMS 19.0 Released

Published 2023-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato has a new version of Management Studio for us:

In addition, we received a lot of feedback about the dialog box, “Querying transaction count”, we introduced back in SSMS 18.11.   In 18.12, we added an option to cancel the check if it took more than two seconds, but user comments indicated that was not enough.  Therefore, in SSMS 19.0 you have the ability to disable to dialog box completely.  Within Tools > Options > Query Execution, simply uncheck the option “Check for open transactions before closing T-SQL query windows”.  

That alone might be worth it, especially if you work via VPN and have a bunch of SSMS tabs open.

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TempDB Improvements in SQL Server Versions

Published 2023-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Poche looks at the recent past:

Tempdb contention has long been an issue in SQL Server, and there are many blogs on the issue already. But I wanted to add one more mainly to highlight the improvements in recent versions of SQL Server

Tempdb contention is most often discussed in as relating to the creation of temp tables (and other objects) in tempdb. If you are experiencing this you will see PAGELATCH_EX or PAGELATCH_SH waits, frequently with wait resources like 2:1:1 or 2:1:3. This indicates contention in database 2 (tempdb), page 1 (the first data file in tempdb), and one of the PFS, GAM, or SGAM pages (which are pages 1, 2, and 3 respectively). Tempdb files of sufficient size will have additional PFS, GAM, and SGAM pages at higher page numbers, but 1 and 3 are the pages most often referenced.

Read on to see what the SQL Server team has done over three of the past four versions of SQL Server to limit tempdb contention.

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Azure Data Studio 1.41 Now Available

Published 2023-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato has a bundle of updates for us:

The query results window got a fair bit of attention this release as we work through the backlog of open issues. First, we introduced a new configuration option to show or hide the action bar in the query results view. The Query Editor > Results: Show Action Bar option can be found in the command palette (CTRL + , ) if you type Show Action Bar. By default, the action bar is shown in the query results pane, as seen in the screenshot below:

Check out the full set of changes in the article.

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DB Restoration and Upgrade Management for Arc-Enabled Data Services

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd continues a series on Azure Arc-Enabled Data Services. Part 9 covers database restoration:

Now that we have our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance deployed, potentially one of the most common tasks you will need to undertake is being able to perform a database restore of an existing database to your newly provisioned Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance.

In our previous post, we deployed our Azure Arc-enabled SQL Managed Instance – “ae-sqlmi-demo” that we will continue to investigate and learn about how we can utilize in our data environments. In this post, we are having a look at restoring a database.

Part 10 looks at upgrade management:

Managing your Data Controller through Azure Data Studio provides an easy approach for controlling when you wish to apply upgrades supplied by Microsoft. This is something you need to stay on top of as the upgrade path is an incremental approach and only allows you to upgrade to the next version. If you leave it too long, you could be faced with multiple upgrades to be undertaken. This could lead to extended outages while you get up to date.

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SQL ConstantCare Population Analysis

Published 2022-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar looks at the ConstantCare customer base:

Companies are leapfrogging right past SQL Server 2017. I’m going to hazard a guess that SQL Server 2017 came out too quickly after 2016, and didn’t offer enough features to justify upgrades from 2016.

Does that offer us any lessons for SQL Server 2022? Is 2022 going to be a 2017-style release that people just leapfrog over? Well, as I write this, it’s late December 2022, and I’m not seeing the widespread early adoption that I saw for 2019 where people had it in development environments ahead of the release, learning how to use it.

It’s an interesting analysis of a particular market segment: users of the ConstantCare service.

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