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Category: Versions

SQL Server on Linux 2022 Available in Preview

Published 2023-08-14 by Kevin Feasel

Amit Khandelwal has an update on SQL Server on Linux:

We are glad to announce that SQL Server 2022 is now available in preview mode for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. For this preview, only Evaluation edition is available, which is limited to 180 days starting Thursday, July 27th, 2023. 

In your Dev/Test environments, you may now take advantage of the most recent SQL Server 2022 improvements on both RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. Currently, production workloads on RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04 are not supported by the SQL Server 2022 preview packages. You can run the production workloads for SQL Server 2022 on RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 22.04 and they are fully supported. 

I’m going to wait until it’s actually available for real, not just in preview.

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Azure Data Studio 1.45 Released

Published 2023-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato gives us an update:

In this release we updated to VS Code version 1.79.2, from version 1.70, bringing ADS nearly current with VS Code.  Keeping up with VS Code is an artifact of Azure Data Studio being a fork of VS Code, and the team accomplished a major feat with this latest merge.  Many of the changes are not immediately obvious to users, but there are improvements across security, performance, and the application interface.

Read on for the highlights.

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Connecting to SQL Server 2022 via Azure AD

Published 2023-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri makes a connection:

Applicable to-

SQL Server 2022 on-prem on Windows and Linux and SQL Server 2022 hosted on Windows Virtual Machines.

Once you install the SQL Server, there are three different authentication methods that you can use to connect SQL Server along with the Windows and SQL Server authentication. They are –

  1. Azure Active Directory Universal with Multi-Factor Authentication
  2. Azure Active Directory Password
  3. Azure Active Directory Integrated

Read on for the pre-requisites as well as a detailed guide on how to set everything up.

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model_msdb and model_replicatedmaster Databases

Published 2023-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy says hands off:

There was a question that came up on the MCM mailing list about what are these files: model_msdbdata.mdf, model_msdblog.ldf, model_replicatedmaster.mdf, model_replicatedmaster.ldf? It was pointed out that the files don’t show up in the typical DMVs and seem to not really be used at the moment.

These are the databases used as the basis for the system databases in contained availability groups. Definitely don’t touch them, just leave them be, even if you aren’t using availability groups (let alone contained).

Click through for more information on how you can find them and another warning not to mess with them.

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Apache Kafka 3.5 Released

Published 2023-06-16 by Kevin Feasel

Mickael Maison has an announcement for us:

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 3.5.0. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent features. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

See the Upgrading to 3.5.0 from any version 0.8.x through 3.4.x section in the documentation for the list of notable changes and detailed upgrade steps.

The ability to migrate Kafka clusters from ZK to KRaft mode with no downtime is still an early access feature. It is currently only suitable for testing in non-production environments. See KIP-866 for more details.

Click through for some of the highlights and check out the full release notes as well.

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SSMS 19.1 Updates

Published 2023-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato has a two-parter around SSMS 19.1. The first includes a small but important change:

In SSMS 19.1, the default value for Use system default web browser was changed to True.  This only applies to new installations; anyone upgrading from an earlier version of SSMS 19 will need to change the option to True manually.

This means that, for new installations, clicking on a link in SSMS will no longer open in the built-in SSMS browser, which doesn’t work for a lot of newer sites.

Part 2 picks up with some additional changes:

We have heard complaints, for months, about the startup time for SSMS.  Between 18.12.1 and 19.0 we made a few changes, and in 19.1 we delayed initializing the output window to also reduce startup time.  Some of you noticed!  Glenn Berry completed a round of testing and documented findings in his SSMS 19.1 Performance Improvements blog post.  We are hoping to also gain improvement when we get to SSMS 20, so know that our work is not yet done.

Click through for the full set of chnages.

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Azure Data Studio 1.44 Released

Published 2023-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato has an update for us:

It seems like just last week we were just releasing Azure Data Studio 1.43 (oh wait, that was last month) and here we are announcing Azure Data Studio 1.44!

This release comes in the midst of Microsoft Build, where numerous Copilot-adjacent announcements have been shared for different applications.  We are excited to announce that the GitHub Copilot extension is now available in the extension gallery with the Azure Data Studio 1.44 release!  For complete details and some examples, please see Drew’s post, Introducing GitHub Copilot for Azure Data Studio.

Click through for what’s new.

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Updates to Always Encrypted since 2016

Published 2023-05-10 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand notes some changes:

In 2015, during the SQL Server 2016 beta, I explored a new feature is this article, Always Encrypted. This feature finally allowed us to encrypt data at rest and on the wire, and I showed how beneficial this was and how much more secure your data could be. I also explained that, as a new feature, some limitations made it difficult to use and, sometimes, impossible to adopt.

Several major versions of SQL Server later, how has this feature evolved, and is it easier to use today?

Read on for the answer. Aaron also covers secure enclaves, a big topic for Always Encrypted users.

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CETAS in SQL Server 2022

Published 2023-05-04 by Kevin Feasel

Eric Rouach shows off a nice extension to T-SQL in SQL Server 2022:

Create External Table As Select or “CETAS” has finally become available on SQL Server with the release of the 2022 version.

After a short setup, we can create various formats files containing any query’s result set. The created file/s must be kept on an Azure storage solution i.e. Azure Blob Storage.

The process also creates an external table reflecting the updated file’s content.

We’ve been able to do this in Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated and serverless SQL pools for a while, so it’s good to be able to create an external table from a SELECT query on-premises, especially considering that it’s the only way we have left to write to external sources using PolyBase.

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Diffify Updates

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Myles Mitchell celebrates a year of diffify:

We’ve just passed an important milestone for diffify: our app for tracking Python and R package releases has just turned 1 year old! To mark this exciting occasion we are delighted to announce an “anniversary update” featuring numerous quality of life improvements. This post will outline the latest changes and tease at some exciting developments in the works…

Check out these recent changes and a little bit of what’s on the horizon.

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