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Category: Versions

Migrating to Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server from Single Server

Published 2024-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush performs a migration:

Why Migrate to Flexible Server?

  • High availability and disaster recovery: Flexible Server provides higher availability with zone-redundant architecture.
  • Customizable maintenance windows: More control over when updates and maintenance tasks occur.
  • Performance improvements: Fine-tuned scaling and performance adjustments without downtime.
  • Enhanced security: With VNet integration and more advanced networking options.

Read on to learn more about by when you have to migrate and how you can perform the migration.

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Online DR from SQL Server 2022 and Azure SQL MI Now Available

Published 2024-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Djordje Jeremic announces general availability of one of the key selling points from SQL Server 2022:

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the following two major capabilities of the Managed Instance link feature with SQL Server 2022:

  • Two-way failover between SQL Server 2022 and SQL Managed Instance through the link to unlock true disaster recovery (DR) with Azure
  • Creating a link from SQL Managed Instance to SQL Server 2022 to unlock off-PaaS data mobility for regulatory and dev/test scenarios 

Click through for more detail.

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Cardinality Estimation Changes Post-SQL Server 2014

Published 2024-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar reminds us that small changes happen:

About 10 years ago, Microsoft made changes to the Cardinality Estimator (CE) which caused some problems for SQL Server upgrades. When folks upgraded to SQL Server 2014, they also casually switched their databases’ compatibility level to the latest version, because for years that hadn’t really affected query plans. They just figured they wanted the “latest and greatest” compat level, without regard to the effects. That backfired badly when they suddenly got 2014’s Cardinality Estimation changes.

So for several years, whenever someone upgraded from older versions, and they complained about performance, the stock community answer was, “Change your compatibility level back to what it used to be.” In many cases, that just solved the problems outright, leading to blog posts like this and this.

Even today on SQL Server 2019 & 2022, this advice is still relevant! If you mess around with compatibility levels, you can absolutely change cardinality estimations in ways you didn’t expect.

Read on for more information, including examples where cardinality estimation has improved with SQL Server 2022 and where it has gotten worse.

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Online Upgrade of Logical and Physical Replication Notes in Postgres

Published 2024-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Kapila notes an improvement in replication capabilities:

In my last blog post, Evolution of Logical Replication, I mentioned the future development of a feature to allow “upgrades of logical replication nodes.” The upcoming release of PostgreSQL 17 includes this feature. Previously, after major version upgrades (via pg_upgrade), users couldn’t immediately connect and write data to logical replication nodes. This was because the slots were lost during upgrades, preventing replication from continuing. As a result, new writes wouldn’t get replicated, causing data on both nodes to become out of sync. As explained in this blog post, users had to block applications from writing until the replication setup was re-enabled after the upgrade.

Read on to see how PostgreSQL 17 changes things.

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TLS 1.2 (or Later) in Azure SQL

Published 2024-09-25 by Kevin Feasel

Sakshi Gupta provides a public service announcement:

From November 1st, any Azure SQL server left with the “Select an option” or “NONE” setting (where “NONE” means no enforced minimum TLS version) will only allow connections using TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. Connections using TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 will be rejected. It is critical for all customers to configure their servers correctly and ensure that their client applications can operate with TLS 1.2 or higher.

Pretty much any SQL Server client or driver that Microsoft released from 2016 forwards will support TLS 1.2, so for most organizations, this should be as simple as enabling the option in development and ensuring applications connect as expected.

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Checking Cumulative Update Status on SQL Server Instances

Published 2024-09-17 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones reminds you to check those cumulative updates:

How can I quickly get a CU patch for a system that’s out of date? I’ll discuss that situation.

You might think you get to patch every instance every few months, and you may be able to. But most of us have laggards in any decent-sized estate. Someone always wants to avoid patching, or skip patching on the day you’ve scheduled every other system.

Steve’s solution involves using Redgate Monitor, though you could also do this on your own or using something like dbatools to get information about your estate.

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Azure SQL DB Hyperscale Elastic Pools now GA

Published 2024-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Arvind Shyamsundar has an announcement:

Azure SQL Database is the preferred database technology for hundreds of thousands of customers. Built on top of the rock-solid SQL Server engine and leveraging leading cloud-native architecture and technologies, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale offers leading performance, scalability and elasticity with one of the lowest TCO in the industry .

While you may start with a standalone Hyperscale database, chances are that as your fleet of databases grows, you want to optimize price and performance across a set of Hyperscale databases. Elastic pools offer the convenience of pooling resources like CPU, memory, IO, while ensuring strong security isolation between those databases.

Read on to learn more about what it offers and what it costs.

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Migrating Power BI Dataflows from Gen1 to Gen2

Published 2024-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad talks migration:

Unfortunately, there isn’t a migration tool to convert your Power BI dataflow (gen1) to Microsoft Fabric dataflow (gen2). If you have Fabric capacity licenses, it just makes sense to do that migration because Dataflow Gen2 gives you data destinations into four destinations, which we don’t have in Dataflow Gen1. However, converting Gen1 to Gen2 isn’t that complicated. The process is explained in this blog and video.

Click through for the blog post and the video.

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Backing SQL Server up to S3 Buckets

Published 2024-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

David Fowler backs up a database:

Way back in the mists of time I wrote a post on how to backup SQL server to an S3 bucket using TNTDrive, https://sqlundercover.com/2018/06/18/backup-your-on-premise-sql-server-directly-to-an-aws-s3-bucket/.

Back then, if we wanted to backup SQL to S3 we needed to use a third party tool. Since SQL 2022 things have changed and we’ve now got the option to backup directly to S3 in a similar way that we can backup to Azure BLOB store.

And, going one step further, you can also use PolyBase to read data from S3 buckets in SQL Server 2022.

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