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Category: Versions

What’s New with Standard Edition

Published 2019-10-28 by Kevin Feasel

Niko 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 edition

I 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.

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Making the SQL Server 2019 Edition Cut

Published 2019-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Brent 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.

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Disambiguating Azure SQL Database Classes

Published 2019-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

Arun 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.

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Upgrading Azure Kubernetes Service

Published 2019-09-18 by Kevin Feasel

Chris 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.

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Rolling Windows Upgrades with AGs + WSFC

Published 2019-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Allan Hirt shows how you can combine Availability Groups with Windows Server Failover Clusters and upgrade the operating system version while keeping your SQL Servers running:

The configuration for a cluster rolling upgrade allows for mixed Windows Server versions to coexist in the same WSFC. This is NOT a deployment method. It is an upgrade method. DO NOT use this for normal use. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not put a time limit on how long you can run in this condition, so you could be stupid and do something like have a mixed Windows Server 2012 R2/2016 WSFC. Fire, ready, aim. The WSFC knows about this and you’ll see a warning with an Event ID of 1548.

Read on for a summary of what Allan has learned in doing this.

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SQL Server 2019 RC1

Published 2019-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Banerjee announces SQL Server 2019 Release Candidate 1:

Today we’re announcing the availability of the first public release candidate for SQL Server 2019, which is now available for download. SQL Server 2019 brings the industry-leading performance and security of SQL Server to Windows, Linux, and containers and can tackle any data workload from business intelligence to data warehousing to analytics and AI over all your data both structured and unstructured.

Amit’s update covers the span of what we’ve seen in all of the CTPs. I went through the release notes and did not find a huge amount of detail on what went into RC1 versus CTP 3.2. But the fact that they’re up to RCs means that SQL Server 2019 is getting close to release.

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Azure Data Studio August Release

Published 2019-08-20 by Kevin Feasel

Alan Yu announces a new version of Azure Data Studio:

The key highlights to cover this month include:
– SandDance integration—A new way to interact with data
– Notebook improvements
– SQL Server Dacpac extension can support Azure Active Directory
– SQL Server 2019 extension
– Visual Studio Code merge 1.37
– Bug fixes

Being able to add a new cell inline is nice, especially when you’re dealing with larger notebooks.

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SSMS 18.2 Available

Published 2019-07-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dinakar Nethi announces SQL Server Management Studio version 18.2:

We are excited to announce the release of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 18.2. For this update, while we added some features, our focus was dedicated to fundamentals such as stability, reliability, performance, etc.

You can download SQL Server Management Studio 18.2 today.
Some of the new features in SQL Server Management Studio include:

– Intellisense/editor: Added support for data classification
– Query execution: Added a completion time in the messages to track when a given query completed its execution.
– ShowPlan: Added new attribute in query plan when the inline scalar UDF feature is enabled.

There are several bugfixes in there as well.

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SQL Server 2019 CTP 3.2

Published 2019-07-25 by Kevin Feasel

Asad Khan announces the release of SQL Server 2019 CTP 3.2:

With this release of SQL Server 2019 community technology preview 3.2, we are announcing the public preview of Big Data Clusters for SQL Server 2019. Big Data Clusters for SQL Server enables big data analytics within SQL Server. It brings HDFS and Apache Spark™ into SQL Server for scale out compute and storage.

Big data clusters allow you to deploy scalable clusters of SQL Server, Apache Spark™, and HDFS running on Kubernetes. It provides all the tools and systems to ingest, store, and prepare data for analysis as well as to train and operationalize machine learning models. It allows you to query external data sources through data virtualization and combine and analyze your high-value relational data with high-volume big data. You will be also be able to build and deploy scalable and productive data-driven applications in big data clusters.

There’s a good bit in this release and because we’re in the 3.x range, you should be able to upgrade directly.

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