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Category: Versions

Changes to Accelerated Database Recovery in 2025

Published 2025-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich points out something interesting coming in SQL Server 2025:

Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) was introduced in SQL Server 2019. Its main purpose is to allow for faster database recovery in the event of a crash or unexpected shutdown. Traditionally, the database engine handles crash recovery through a series of phases—analysis, redo, and undo—which can be inefficient and slow, especially when dealing with long-running transactions.

To make a long story short, ADR “shortcutsˮ the recovery process by introducing a new approach to handling undo operations. Instead of relying heavily on scanning the transaction log—which can be painfully slow for uncommitted or long-running transactions—ADR maintains a version store within the user database to track row-level changes. This allows SQL Server to quickly roll back uncommitted transactions without scanning the entire log. The result is much faster crash recovery, quicker rollbacks, and improved overall database availability, particularly in high-transaction environments.

Read on to see what’s new, as well as some of the consequences of enabling this feature.

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Comparing OrioleDB and Neon

Published 2025-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Alexander Korotkov reminds us that there are a lot of data platform products out there:

In a recent Hacker News discussion, there was some confusion about the differences between OrioleDB and Neon. Both look alike at first glance. Both promise a “next‑gen Postgres”. Both have support for cloud‑native storage.

This post explains how the two projects differ in practice. And importantly, OrioleDB is more than an undo log for PostgreSQL.

Alexander is the creator of OrioleDB, so price in any vendor bias you wish as you see the comparison of two up-and-coming technologies.

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Maintaining Statistics Information Post-Update in PostgreSQL 18

Published 2025-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Laurenz Albe takes a peek at an upcoming feature:

Everybody wants good performance. When it comes to the execution of SQL statements, accurate optimizer statistics are key. With the upcoming v18 release, PostgreSQL will preserve the optimizer statistics during an upgrade with dump/restore or pg_upgrade (see commit 1fd1bd8710 and following). With the beta testing season for PostgreSQL v18 opened, it is time to get acquainted with the new feature.

It’s kind of wild to me that this wasn’t in place years ago for PostgreSQL.

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Standard Developer Edition in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni explains why this is a big deal:

No, it’s not dark mode for SQL Server Management Studio, though the votes are probably close. (Note: I feel like I’m the only IT pro who doesn’t use dark mode, and it’s because I record/present so much—pro tip: you shouldn’t present in dark mode). It’s also not the enhancements to Always On Availability Groups, but you’ll read more about those either here or over at Redmond in the coming months. The most requested feature in SQL Server 2025 is Standard Developer Edition (which is an unfortunate name, but in my discussions with the product group, there just wasn’t anything better they could come up, and legal wouldn’t approve Standard McDatabaseyface).

My hot take is that I don’t use dark mode either. More people should just have proper task lighting when they’re working.

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Testing ZSTD Backup Compression in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand runs some tests:

Whether you are a bank or a hot dog stand, creating backups is a boring but essential part of managing databases. Compressing backups – like other types of data compression – can save time and storage space, at the usually unavoidable cost of CPU. There has been little change in compression throughout SQL Server’s long history, but this year, in SQL Server 2025, there is an exciting change coming.

This set of results from Aaron is a bit different from what we’ve seen from Andy Yun and Anthony Nocentino. That’s a big part of why it’s important to get several data points, and to do your own testing in your own environment with your own equipment.

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Resource Governor on TempDB in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Pollack takes a peak at some upcoming functionality:

TempDB is a system database in SQL Server that manages temporary objects for all databases on a server. Because it is a shared resource, it can easily become a performance bottleneck., as well as an opportunity for a single database or even a single query to wreck SQL Server performance.

Because of this, administrators will often give TempDB plenty of space and put its files on the fastest storage available. Even with these precautions, it is still possible for a TempDB-hungry workload to hog space and resources that result in latency or timeouts for end users.

SQL Server 2025 introduces the ability to use Resource Governor to help manage TempDB resources automatically. This article dives into the new feature, how to configure it, and how it can effectively manage TempDB-heavy workloads.

Ed starts with a primer on TempDB and Resource Governor functionality, then dives right in. It’s good to see some love for Resource Governor.

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SSMS 21 Extended Events Session Creation Bugfix

Published 2025-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey is happy:

I have a proper blog post coming out tomorrow for T-SQL Tuesday, but today, celebrate with me that SSMS 21 finally, at long last, fixes the irritating fact that the New Session window in SSMS for Extended Events always opened to the wrong size.

Click through for an example of the bug and how SSMS 21 fixes things. This type of bug is particularly pernicious because there aren’t scroll bars or any sort of indicator that some additional functionality exists, so unless you know that it’s there, you won’t know to look for it.

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What’s Forthcoming for DBAs in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Stephen Planck has a list:

There is a lot to be excited about in SQL Server 2025! When thinking about features that may not get as much attention as others, yet will make a real difference in the lives of DBAs, I have selected my top 5 enhancements for SQL Server 2025. These improvements may not make the headlines, but they address pain points we’ve all experienced as DBAs. Please let me know if I’ve left any of your favorites off the list.

Read on for the list. It’s not a set of fancy new features, though there are some quality of life improvements here.

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What’s New in Apache Spark 4.0

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Ram Ghadiyaram looks at recent updates to Apache Spark:

Hurray! Apache Spark 4.0, released in 2025, redefines big data processing with innovations that enhance performance, accessibility, and developer productivity. With contributions from over 400 developers across organizations like Databricks, Apple, and NVIDIA, Spark 4.0 resolves thousands of JIRA issues, introducing transformative features: native plotting in PySpark, Python Data Source API, polymorphic User-Defined Table Functions (UDTFs), state store enhancements, SQL scripting, and Spark Connect improvements. This report provides an in-depth exploration of these features, their technical underpinnings, and practical applications through original examples and diagrams.

Click through to see what’s on the list of major features.

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Creating a SQL Server 2025 Container

Published 2025-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea tries out SQL Server 2025:

This post covers creating SQL Server 2025 containers in Podman, Qnap Container Station, and sqlcmd, and restoring a sample database to test the new version.

One important thing to remember is that all SQL Server 2025 containers are based on the Linux build of SQL Server. For 90% of tasks (give or take), that won’t matter, and you’ll still have a good time trying out the new version of SQL Server and make sure things still work in your databases the way you expect them to. But some functionality (e.g., merge replication) is not available in Linux and other functionality (like PolyBase or Machine Learning Services) has a very different installation process.

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