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Category: Versions

The Benefits of Indirect Checkpoints

Published 2022-01-19 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand explains why it’s probably a good idea to enable indirect checkpoints:

At Stack Overflow, the upgrade to SQL Server 2019 was not as smooth as expected. It introduced long recovery times and high CPU on a secondary, during synchronization activity after failover, patching, and network connectivity testing. This symptom wasn’t present during similar activities and workloads under SQL Server 2017.

Aaron points out that if you have databased created in older versions of SQL Server, enabling indirect checkpoints can provide a performance boost to certain activities around log writing., including backup times.

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Cleaning SQL Express Databases

Published 2021-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill knows the pain:

I was contacted by a lawyer that was using a 3rd party application to store emails, keep track of time, etc.

The backend of the application is SQL Server Express edition, which has a hard limit of 10GB for the data file.

One quick note for people with lots of LOB data, remember to reorganize with LOB_COMPACTION = ON as that’s the only way to be sure. Also, depending on how old the version of SQL Server is, there was a bug with LOB compaction which affected SQL Server 2014 and earlier. But, uh, hopefully you’re patched past that point…

Also, getting up to 2016 SP1 means that Express Edition gets data compression. It wouldn’t directly help in this case, but if you have a lot of non-LOB data on Express Edition, it can work wonders, for some definition of “wonders.” After all, if you’re using Express Edition, wonders are by definition pretty small.

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SQL Server 2022 and Big Releases

Published 2021-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar opines on an interesting topic:

The question, posed by Brent’s Tasty Beverage (nicely done) was:

My friends feel announcement from MS regarding SQL22 were only relatively small changes (since we didn’t see too much of multiple plans technically or demo), nothing groundbreaking or revolutionary. What are your thoughts?

Read on for Brent’s thoughts. I’ll say that I’m still expecting a few smaller surprises to come in as we get closer to CTPs.

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Ignite Announcements

Published 2021-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

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.

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SQL Server 2022 Preview Announced

Published 2021-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Peter 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.

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Considerations when Upgrading to SQL Server 2019

Published 2021-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Tom 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.

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New in SQL Server Big Data Clusters

Published 2021-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel 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.

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SQL Server Express Memory Limitations

Published 2021-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Stedman notes that the memory limitations on SQL Server Express Edition are not quite as stringent as you may first believe:

Looking 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.

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