Bob Ward demos (and Connor joined) the “it just gets faster without code changes” in SQL Server 2022 (Parameter sensitive plan optimization)
Click through for a screenshot-heavy review, in case you missed it.
Comments closedCategory: Versions
James Serra has a round-up of Ignite 2022 announcements:
Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra: Is now GA. Cassandra is an open source, column family store NoSQL database. The Azure Cassandra service includes an automatic synchronization feature that can sync data between with customers’ own Cassandra instances, on-premises and elsewhere. More info
Wolfgang Strasser has some thoughts as well on what Ignite has shown us so far:
As you might have noticed, Azure Purview is one of my newest friends in Azure Data town. During Ignite, the support for Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), the Data Lake Data Asset Access Governance, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Integration with Azure Purview was announced.
What I really look forward to test is the Data Asset Access Governance for Data Lake storages. Imagine a world that allows you to define permission on a central place and those permissions are brought to a storage account / system of your choice..
Read both of them for two different perspectives.
Comments closedPeter Carlin ends our long national nightmare:
SQL Server 2022 integrates with Azure Synapse Link and Azure Purview to enable customers to drive deeper insights, predictions, and governance from their data at scale. Cloud integration is enhanced with disaster recovery (DR) to Azure SQL Managed Instance, along with no-ETL (extract, transform, and load) connections to cloud analytics, which allow database administrators to manage their data estates with greater flexibility and minimal impact to the end-user. Performance and scalability are automatically enhanced via built-in query intelligence. There is choice and flexibility across languages and platforms, including Linux, Windows, and Kubernetes.
Click through for a quick overview of what’s making its way into the product.
2 CommentsTom Collins has a checklist of things to consider before upgrading to SQL Server 2019:
Application Lifecycle – Each SQL Server version gets 10 years support. 5 years in mainstream support & 5 years in extended support
Mainstream support includes functional, performance, scalability and security updates.
Extended support includes only security updates.Analyse these support levels in the context of your organisations requirements . If the organization has a large footprint with a large multi-year upgrade cycle – than that will have different considerations to smaller scale
Read on for the full list.
Comments closedDaniel Coelho has an update on what’s available in SQL Server Big Data Clusters:
SQL Server Big Data Clusters (BDC) is a capability brought to market as part of the SQL Server 2019 release. Big Data Clusters extends SQL Server’s analytical capabilities beyond in-database processing of transactional and analytical workloads by uniting the SQL engine with Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop to create a single, secure, and unified data platform. It is available exclusively to run on Linux containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes, and can be deployed in multiple-cloud providers or on-premises.
Today, we’re proud to announce the release of the latest cumulative update, CU13, for SQL Server Big Data Clusters which includes important changes and capabilities:
Updating to the most recent production-ready version of Spark (as of today) is a nice upgrade.
Comments closedLooking at the memory limits and other limits on the SQL Server versions over time, we have seen things increase, but one limit that is still very low is the memory limit for SQL Express. Specifically the maximum memory for buffer pool per instance of SQL Server Database Engine for SQL 2019. The limit there is 1410 MB.
At first glance you may think that this limit is the total amount of memory that SQL Server will use, but let me show you a couple of screen shots for Database Health Monitor showing the memory utilization on two different SQL 2019 Express servers.
Read on to see what, exactly, the memory limitation is. Also, there are separate limits for things like In-Memory OLTP table sizes.
Comments closedStephan Ewen and Johannes Moser have aa round-up of the latest Apache Flink updates:
The Apache Software Foundation recently released its annual report and Apache Flink once again made it on the list of the top 5 most active projects! This remarkable activity also shows in the new 1.14.0 release. Once again, more than 200 contributors worked on over 1,000 issues. We are proud of how this community is consistently moving the project forward.
This release brings many new features and improvements in areas such as the SQL API, more connector support, checkpointing, and PyFlink. A major area of changes in this release is the integrated streaming & batch experience. We believe that, in practice, unbounded stream processing goes hand-in-hand with bounded- and batch processing tasks, because many use cases require processing historic data from various sources alongside streaming data. Examples are data exploration when developing new applications, bootstrapping state for new applications, training models to be applied in a streaming application, or re-processing data after fixes/upgrades.
Read on for the list of changes.
Comments closedPedro Lopes announces the last service pack ever:
The 3rd and final Service Pack release for SQL Server 2016 is now available for download at the Microsoft Downloads site. This is also the last Service Pack for any SQL Server version, as previously announced in the Modern Servicing Model for SQL Server. Please note that registration is no longer required to download.
The cynic in me says “This is the final service pack ever, at least until they re-introduce them in five years under a slightly different name because people keep waiting for CU10 to drop before thinking about migrating to the latest version of the product.”
1 CommentAlex Stuart lays out a finding:
While testing a script that involved calculating index record size recently I was getting some confusing results depending on server version, and after some digging it appears there was a somewhat undocumented change to nonclustered index leaf page structure in SQL Server 2012.
Prior to 2012, as dicussed by Paul Randal in this 2010 blog post (which is still the top result for searching for ‘nonclustered index null bitmap’, hence this post) the null bitmap – that is, a >= 3 byte structure representing null fields in a record – was essentially present in all data pages but not the leaf pages of a nonclustered index that had no nulls in either the index key or any clustering key columns.
Read on for a demonstration using SQL Server 2008 R2 as well as SQL Server 2012.
Comments closedDebbi Lyons and Vijay Kumar have a reminder for us:
While new innovations keep lighting up in the latest releases of SQL Server and Windows Server, support for older versions along with security updates will eventually end. This can lead to the potential for compliance gaps for workloads that still rely on these versions and create missed opportunities to apply innovation to business-critical workloads. SQL Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012, and 2012 R2 End of Extended support is approaching:
– SQL Server 2012 Extended Support will end on July 12, 2022.
– Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 Extended Support will end on October 10, 2023.
The news this week has mostly been about SQL Server 2016 ending mainstream support, but this is a bigger one. Fortunately, there’s still a year to procrastinate plan.