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Category: Versions

SSMS 20.2 and a Preview of 21

Published 2024-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato reaches out:

Hey SQL Tools fans!  We’re halfway through 2024 and due to a confluence of events we have a release of SQL Server Management Studio to announce, version SSMS 20.2.

While we’ve been focused on work for SSMS 21, we made time for a few updates to address known issues that affected your workflows and use of SSMS.  You can read about each update and fix in the release notes, but let’s cover some important fixes here.

Read on to see what’s new in 20.2, as well as some of the major plans in mind for SSMS 21.

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Restoring a SQL Server 2000 Backup in 2024

Published 2024-06-20 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West turns back the clock:

Problem statement: I have a SQL Server 2000 database backup that I need to restore to a supported version of SQL Server (preferably SQL Server 2022). How do I do that?

Read on for Randolph’s answer on how to do this. Pre-2008, things may get a little shaky, as that’s back when Microsoft really deprecated functionality. So even if you do restore a backup using this technique, I do wonder what happens if you were using a deprecated datatype like NTEXT or TIMESTAMP. As of SQL Server 2022, those are still in the product, so I don’t have a good example so much as a bit of niggling paranoia.

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TempDB Contention and SQL Server 2022

Published 2024-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Liew shows off a change in SQL Server 2022:

Tempdb often acts as a high-traffic repository in SQL Server, experiencing significant contention. This includes not only temp table usage but also processes such as triggers, worktables for storing intermediate results for spools, cursors, sorts, work files for hash join, and temporary large object (LOB) storage, just to name a few.

A prominent issue is Global Allocation Map (GAM) and Shared Global Allocation Map (SGAM) system page latch contention, which can be particularly problematic under specific high concurrency workloads.

Read on for a demonstration of this.

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SSIS Extensions in Visual Studio

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard fills us in on what’s happening in the world of Integration Services:

I’m not sure why the decision was made to “fork” development and maintenance of the Integration Services extension for Visual Studio 2022. Based upon experience with SSIS, Visual Studio, and the Microsoft SSIS team, I am confident there’s a very good reason. As one can glean from my appointment screenshot above, I save the links to both pages. The links are:

SSIS Pre-2022: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.SqlServerIntegrationServicesProjects&ssr=false#overview
SSIS 2022: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.MicrosoftDataToolsIntegrationServices

Read on to see what’s new in both of those projects.

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Azure SQL Managed Instanced Update Policies

Published 2024-05-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rod Edwards is not amused:

Ah, SQL 2022, the release that finally brought box SQL and Azure managed instance closer together. We have wonderful toys such as Managed Instance Link, allowing us to connect our SQL 2022 on prem instances with Managed Instance Link. It waslike the first real effort to integrate modern Azure offerings with those who also need / prefer an On Prem presence.

Rob Litjens has a follow-up on this:

I prepared some questions:

  1. What polices does Managed Instance have?
  2. Why did Microsoft implement the ‘Always-up-to-date update policy’ Policy?
  3. Why is it named Policy?
  4. Do we need to update our Azure scripts to implement it (immediately)?
  5. Is there impact on offerings like Managed Instance Link

Do read both of these as they combine for a rounded perspective of the issue Rod brought up.

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Module.Versions in Power Query

Published 2024-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives Internet sleuths something to chew on:

The ever-vigilant folks on the internet have spotted that there’s a new M function in the latest versions of Power BI and Excel: Module.Versions. This function, at the time of writing, returns a record with a single field in that contains the version number of the Power Query engine currently in use.

Click through for an example of calling the function and what it returns as of right now.

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Contained Availability Groups in SQL Server 2022

Published 2024-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rich Benner talks about a new feature:

SQL Server 2022 introduced of a number of new features, and one of the more interesting of these is Contained Availability Groups. These are very close to normal Availability Groups, but they have some very important differences. In this post, I’ll compare the new features included and some of the pitfalls that we’ve come across with their implementation.

Read on to learn more about the functionality and several harsh limitations.

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Updates in R 4.4.0

Published 2024-04-25 by Kevin Feasel

Russ Hyde shares items of interest:

R 4.4.0 (“Puppy Cup”) was released on the 24th April 2024 and it is a beauty. In time-honoured tradition, here we summarise some of the changes that caught our eyes. R 4.4.0 introduces some cool features (one of which is experimental) and makes one of our favourite {rlang} operators available in base R. There are a few things you might need to be aware of regarding handling NULL and complex values.

The full changelog can be found at the r-release ‘NEWS’ page and if you want to keep up to date with developments in base R, have a look at the r-devel ‘NEWS’ page.

Read on for a big note on tail-call recursion, an operator for coalescing, and a few more neat features.

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Updates to Open-Source Procedures sp_QuickieStore, etc.

Published 2024-04-15 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has been busy:

Let’s start with giving some credit, here, since I hate an overdue bill.

ReeceGoding reported and very capably fixed an issue with sp_QuickieStore. The problem only occurred when you ran the procedure with @get_all_databases and the new @escape_brackets parameter set to true. Each loop would add an escape character to the search string, which could end up looking like this: %\\\\\[AnyStringStartingAndEndingWithSquareBrackets]\\\\\]%'

That’s a fix in place, and you can also see updates to sp_HealthParser and sp_PressureDetector.

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