A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Chad Callihan violates Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:
In case you missed it, the latest version of SQL Server Management Studio (19.3) was released on January 10th.
It’s easy to come across these types of releases being mentioned online or notice the friendly reminder pop up when opening SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS):
Read on to see why it’s worth updating to SSMS 19.3.
Comments closedKendra Little provides some guidance:
Whether or not you use Azure SQL Managed Instance, you will likely be asked for an opinion on it eventually if you’re a SQL Server person.
While the architecture is documented, it can be a bit of a long read and some of the gotchas are spread out over different pages – so I’m drawing up the architecture of each service tier along with notable implications for the design on performance and cost. Here’s the scoop on General Purpose.
Click through for Kendra’s thoughts.
Comments closedSteven Sanderson has an update to the TidyDensity package:
The latest release of the
TidyDensityR package brings some major changes and improvements that open up new possibilities for statistical analysis and data visualization. Version 1.3.0 includes breaking changes, new features, and a host of minor fixes and improvements that enhance performance and usability. Let’s dive into what’s new!
Read on for that change list and how you can get a copy of the TidyDensity R package.
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.
Comments closedAccording 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.
Comments closedKendra 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.
Comments closedDavid 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.
Comments closedThe 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.
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.
Comments closedSatish 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.
Comments closed