A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andy Brownsword saves some quid:
If you have a Self-Hosted Integration Runtime (SHIR, or IR for short here) on an Azure Virtual Machine (VM), there’s a cost to keep it online. When used intermittently – for example during batch processes – this is inefficient for costs as you’re paying for the compute you don’t need. One way to alleviate this is by controlling uptime of the environment manually, only bringing it online for as long as needed.
Read on to see how to do this.
Comments closedJohn Deardurff shares the news:
Microsoft has announced that SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22 is now generally available! This latest release brings powerful new capabilities to enhance your SQL Server experience:
Click through to see what’s new and see the original Microsoft blog post on the topic. One thing to note is that the query hint recommendation tool is still in preview, so you do need to select it as an individual component to install.
Comments closedEduardo Pivaral uses the MSSQL extension in Visual Studio Code:
You are a developer using SQL Server for your applications, and you need to quickly setup a local development environment. How can you make sure the environment is OS agnostic, so it can run on any operating system? Let’s see how we can quickly create a local container to run SQL Server using the VSCode MSSQL Extension.
Read on for the instructions. I still do the old-fashioned thing of opening up a terminal window and running docker commands, but this is pretty convenient.
Steve Jones notes one interesting change to backups in SQL Server 2025:
I’ve been a DBA (or Ops manager) for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things I’ve thought was top priority was backups. I always want to be sure I have a recovery strategy, because if I don’t, nothing matters. Things go wrong and systems fail and I need to protect systems.
Security is a close second, but backups really matter.
Something else backup-related that Steve doesn’t mention is the new form of backup compression using ZSTD. Initial testing of this has been fairly positive and I think it’s worth trying it out as well.
Comments closedDeb Melkin is looking forward to a pair of features:
When I look at this release, I feel like I’ve been more tuned into what’s coming out than any other. I’m still not sure how that happened. But I think overall it’s a good thing because there really is a lot being packed into this release. If you’re just trying to figure out now, you’re already behind.
There are really 2 features that I’m really excited about:
Read on to learn more about both of them.
Comments closedChad Callihan is excited about a limitation:
I had written most of this blog post before seeing this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invite. I decided to hold off a few days to post because, while it’s no secret, I think it’s worth pointing out to those that may not know: before you spend time testing SQL Server 2025, make sure you consider what version of Developer Edition to use.
You may read that and ask, “What do you mean? Isn’t there only one Developer Edition?” That used to be the case, but not anymore.
Read on to see why this is important for a large number of companies.
Comments closedTo demo what I mean, I’m going to take the Users table from the Stack Overflow database, and I’m going to pretend that we’re only storing the Id column, and the rest of the columns are JSON, stored in a UserAttributes column. Let’s create a new Users_JSON table to simulate it:
Read on and stay tuned for the way that SQL Server 2025 changes this.
Comments closedTomaz Kastrun has some fun with Pi:
We will do this in the following steps (for the word “eggs”):
- Encode the word EGGS to numbers. E = 5, G = 7, G = 7 and S = 19. Together concatenated we get the string of 57719.
- We store a veeery long string of PI number.
- Start looking in PI number for substring of “57719”.
Click through for the R code.
Comments closedPatrick Gruenauer plays his trap card:
In PowerShell, error handling is a crucial aspect of writing robust and reliable scripts. One of the powerful features to manage errors gracefully is the
trapstatement. Thetrapstatement allows you to define a block of code that runs whenever a terminating error occurs in your script. This can be particularly useful for logging errors, cleaning up resources. Let’s dive in.
Read on to see how it works. My preference would be to use try/catch blocks instead of trap statements, but it is interesting to see it there.
Comments closedHans-Jürgen Schönig demonstrates a new capability in PostgreSQL:
PostgreSQL 18 brings a couple of performance related features to the table which will help applications to run more efficiently, providing a better and more enjoyable user experience. One of those performance features is called “skip scans”. Most of you might ask yourself at this point: Wow, sounds cool, but what is a skip scan? The purpose of this post is to shed some light and explain how this works, what it does and most importantly: How one can benefit from this feature in real life.
Click through for the demo.
Comments closed