A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
John Sterrett explains how you can find prior SQL Server updates:
Back in the day when we were young but not a kid anymore there were service packs and cumulative updates. We could download these separately and all of the updates were easy to find. Now today, if you click on a KB article to download an update you get pointed to the latest update as shown below.
But there is a method, as John shows us.
Comments closedMax Trinidad has a nice update for us:
The moment everyone has been waiting for some time is here, PowerShell Release Candidate is available for download. This a “Go Live” release officially supported in production by Microsoft.
Everyone in the Microsoft PowerShell Team, with the help of the community, has done an excellent job with the evolution of this new version of PowerShell. Read all about it on the PowerShell DevBlogs recent post “Announcing the PowerShell 7.0 Release Candidate“.
Make sure to read all previous posts as they perfectly outlined under the “Why is PowerShell 7 so awesome?” section of the release candidate post.
Click through for more details. One of the nice things in this RC is a consistent Out-Gridview experience, so it’s not just for Windows anymore.
Adrian Buckman announces version 2.0 of Undercover Inspector:
There is a new setting in the Settings table called ‘ReportDataDetailedSummary’ this setting is on or off (0 or 1) and will control the level of detail logged in the summary column. When set to a 1 you will get granular detail of Warning/Advisory counts per server per module, setting this setting to 0 will return it back to the original way of logging which was to summarize the entire report into Warning count and advisory count.
There are a lot of changes in here.
Comments closedPaul Randal walks through an installation error with SQL Server 2019:
I have a brand new Windows 10 laptop that I use solely for teaching, as the HDMI and SVGA connectors on my main laptop somehow have bad connections to the motherboard after a few years of traveling around the world. On the new laptop I have SQL Server 2017, and now that SQL Server 2019 RTM has shipped, and I’ve finished teaching for the year, I set out to install 2019 side-by-side with 2017 so I can move my teaching environment to 2019 and work on demos of the new features pertinent to what I teach.
Thinking this would be a smooth process, I kicked off the install wizard, went through it, hit go, and walked away. I came back half an hour later to see that all install steps had failed.
Read on for Paul’s solution.
Comments closedAsad Khan announces the general availability of SQL Server 2019:
As you saw from our launch announcement earlier today, over a year ago at Microsoft Ignite we announced our first preview of SQL Server 2019 and today our latest release is now generally available.
You have told us that in today’s demanding world of massive data, wide variety of data sources, and expectations of near real-time application and query performance you need more than just a database engine. You need a modern data platform.
If you’re an early adopter, note that there is a patch for it already.
Comments closedBert Wagner has gone all Gartner on us:
I decided to rank these features on two axes: Excitement and Priority
Excitement is easy to describe: how excited I am about using these features. In my case, excitement directly correlates with performance and developer usability improvements. That doesn’t mean “Low Excitement” features aren’t beneficial; on the contrary, many are great, they just don’t top my list (it wouldn’t be fun to have a quadrant with everything in the top right).
Priority is how quickly I’ll work on implementing or tuning these features. The truth is that some of these features will work automatically once a SQL Server instance is upgraded, while some will require extra work (ie. query rewriting, hardware config). Once again, “Low Priority” features aren’t bad, they just won’t be the features that I focus on first.
I might need to give him a PolyBase pep talk and bump that one up and to the right a little.
Comments closedNiko Neugebauer is jazzed about SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition:
The documentation has been released on the Editions & Features support in Sql Server 2019 and there are huge news that will get a good number of Standard Editions users excited.
The thing that should make every single user of the Sql Server 2019 Standard Edition jump is the presence of TDE (Transparent Database Encryption), the feature that
– every single responsible company would love to be able to use to secure their data
– that every single DBA, Developer & IT Professional kept asking Microsoft to include for so many years
– was already there since Azure SQL Database has it by default a couple of years even for the basic editionI am beyond happy with this news. Grateful that Microsoft has listened to the common sense voice and made a security feature available for the paying customers, giving them a little bit more possibility to be conformant to such demanding norms as GDPR.
Aside from that, Niko looks at several new features which will be available in Standard Edition, as well as a few Enterprise-only features.
Comments closedBrent Ozar noticed an update to Microsoft’s “what’s in which edition” document:
The most important stuff:
– Standard Edition is still capped at 128GB RAM.
– Accelerated Database Recovery is in Standard Edition.
– Automatic tuning, batch mode for row store, adaptive memory grants, adaptive joins, and memory-optimized TempDB are Enterprise Edition only.
Click through for more of Brent’s thoughts. Of interest to me is that PolyBase control nodes may now run in Standard Edition. It makes me wonder if they’ll cap that feature somehow, where you get N nodes maximum in a Standard Edition scale-out group, or if it’s uncapped like Enterprise Edition.
Comments closedArun Sirpal explains the different types of Azure SQL Database available to us:
I want to do a quick summary post of the many different types of Azure SQL Database available and I am not talking about elastic pools, VMs etc, more so the singleton type.
Azure SQL Database (I call normal mode) – A choice between the DTU model (Basic, Standard and Premium) and vCore (General Purpose and Business Critical). Within this space there are two different architecture types used by Microsoft under the covers.
As the product expands, we get more and more options, and Arun clarifies where each fits.
Comments closedChris Taylor has a point updates to jump in Azure Kubernetes Service:
As it is late at night my brain wasn’t working as it should be but thought I’d put a quick blog out there to say that if you are on v1.11.5 and want to upgrade to >= v1.13.10 then you have to do this in a 2 stage process by upgrading to v1.12.8 first:
Fortunately, upgrading is pretty easy using the Azure command line or even the Azure portal.
Comments closed