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Category: Versions

What’s New in .NET 8

Published 2023-12-28 by Kevin Feasel

Thao Nguyen keeps us up to date on .NET:

Microsoft has announced .NET 8 recently. It emphasized the cloud, performance, full-stack Blazor and .NET MAUI as major highlights of the latest edition of the company’s free, cross-platform, open-source developer platform.

Of special importance to enterprises, .NET 8 is a long-term support (LTS), which means it will be supported and patched for three years as opposed to 18 months for a standard term support (STS) release.

Click through for the list, as it’s good to keep at least one eye on the developers lest they run around unopposed.

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Database Compatibility Levels and SQL Server Versions

Published 2023-12-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little demands change:

According to Microsoft’s documentation, “Database compatibility level … allow[s] the SQL Server Database Engine to be upgraded while keeping the same functional status for connecting applications by maintaining the same pre-upgrade database compatibility level.”

But these days, the “functional status” of a database at a given compatibility level differs depending on whether you’re using SQL Server, Azure SQL Managed Instance, or Azure SQL Database – and in the hosted versions it may change anytime without notice. Surprise, your database behaves differently now!

The whole concept is breaking down, and this is bad news for users of both managed services and the boxed product.

Read on to learn more about the issue.

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What’s Missing in Azure SQL Managed Instance?

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little gives us the lowdown:

Spoiler: a large amount of features from SQL Server 2022 are missing from Azure SQL Managed Instance. Some major features are missing that were introduced in SQL Server 2019– and here we are just a few weeks away from 2024.

But Microsoft’s top-line marketing claims about Azure SQL Managed Instance remain that “it’s always up to date with the latest SQL features and functionality.”

Let’s dig into some of the documented highlights on missing features, so you can decide for yourself what to think of that statement.

Read on for Kendra’s take. I agree with the overall argument: Managed Instance is an expensive service intended to serve as a SQL Server replacement. But there’s still a lot missing from the product and it still feels like it’s smarter simply to build a VM running SQL Server rather than play the Managed Instance game. Azure SQL DB I extend a bit more grace toward, as its intent is a bit different from the SQL Server box product or Managed Instance.

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Azure Data Studio 1.47 Now Available

Published 2023-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

David Levy announces a new release of Azure Data Studio:

Another change that is sure to be noticed is that we have enabled parallel message processing by default. This change will improve the performance of the application when connected to SQL Server data sources. We have introduced two new settings to manage this new behavior. The first setting, Mssql: Parallel Message Processing is set to true by default. The other setting, Mssql: Parallel Message Processing Limit, has a default of 100. This setting controls the number of threads used for parallel processing. We are excited to hear your impressions on the impact of this change.

Read on for the full list of changes.

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Apache Zookeeper Vulnerability

Published 2023-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

The Instaclustr team reviews an announcement:

On October 11, 2023, the Apache ZooKeeper™ project announced that a security vulnerability has been identified in Apache ZooKeeper, CVE-2023-44981. The Apache ZooKeeper project has classified the severity of this CVE as critical. The CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) 3.x severity rating for this vulnerability by the NVD (National Vulnerability Database) is base score 9.1 Critical.  

That’s a rather high base score and is comes about if you have the setting quorum.auth.enableSasl=true. Updating to the Zookeeper 3.7.2 or alter, 3.8.3 or later, or anything in the 3.9 branch will fix this vulnerability.

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ConstantCare Population Report for Fall 2023

Published 2023-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares some percentages:

For the long story: ever wonder how fast people are adopting new versions of SQL Server, or what’s “normal” out there for SQL Server adoption rates? Let’s find out in the summer 2023 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.

Out of the thousands of monitored SQL Servers, a whopping 44% are SQL Server 2019! That’s the highest percentage we’ve seen for any version in the 3 years that we’ve been doing this analysis.

Standard statistical sampling rules apply, though there is an interesting note in the comments about how EC2 instances break down in AWS by version of SQL Server, and the numbers are reasonably similar.

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Apache Kafka 3.6 Released

Published 2023-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Satish Duggana announces what’s new in Apache Kafka 3.6:

The ability to migrate Kafka clusters from a ZooKeeper metadata system to a KRaft metadata system is now ready for usage in production environments. See the ZooKeeper to KRaft migration operations documentation for details. Note that support for JBOD is still not available for KRaft clusters, therefore clusters utilizing JBOD can not be migrated. See KIP-858 for details regarding KRaft and JBOD.

Support for Delegation Tokens in KRaft (KAFKA-15219) was completed in 3.6, further reducing the gap of features between ZooKeeper-based Kafka clusters and KRaft. Migration of delegation tokens from ZooKeeper to KRaft is also included in 3.6.

Tiered Storage is an early access feature. It is currently only suitable for testing in non-production environments. See the Early Access Release Notes for more details.

Read on for more details around what’s new in Apache Kafka.

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SQL Server Security Updates

Published 2023-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Srinivas Kandibanda announces a series of security updates for all supported versions of SQL Server:

The Security Update for SQL Server 2022 RTM CU8 is now available for download at the Microsoft Download Center and Microsoft Update Catalog sites. This package cumulatively includes all previous SQL Server 2022 fixes through CU8, plus it includes the new security fixes detailed in the KB Article.

I linked specifically to the SQL Server 2022 RTM CU8 blog post, but there are security bulletins for all versions of SQL Server going back to 2014. If you’re running SQL Server 2012 or earlier, no updates for you.

Also, the highest-risk CVE items are in SQL Server 2019 and 2022; for 2017 and below, the one security bulletin covers a moderate-severity denial of service attack.

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SQL Server 2022 on SuSE Enterprise Linux Now Available in Azure Marketplace

Published 2023-10-04 by Kevin Feasel

Arvind Mahadevan has an announcement:

We are pleased to announce that we have worked with both SUSE and Microsoft engineering teams to release the latest SQL Server 2022 on SLES v15 SP5 Azure Marketplace image. This is in alignment with our goal to have the latest SQL Server on Linux Azure Marketplace images.

It’s a short post but does give us an idea of where they’re at on Linux support. Support for Ubuntu 22.04 is still in preview, so I’d expect that to come out soon as well.

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