SQL Server

When you turn on last actual plans in SQL Server 2019 and newer: Transact-SQL ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET LAST_QUERY_PLAN_STATS = ON; 1 ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET LAST_QUERY_PLAN_STATS = ON; The system function sys.dm_exec_query_plan_stats is supposed to show you the last actual query plan for a query. I’ve had really hit-or-miss luck with this…

On July 14, 2026, Microsoft’s extended support ends for SQL Server 2016. Brent Ozar Unlimited circa 2016 They will offer Extended Security Updates that you can buy for 3 more years, either through Azure or your licensing partner. The price is stunning: Year 1, July 2026-2027: 75% of the original license price Year 2, July…

Whenever a brand spankin’ new version of any software comes out, there are bugs, and SQL Server is no exception. This has led to a mentality where folks don’t wanna install a new version of SQL Server until the first couple of Cumulative Updates come out, hopefully fixing the first big round of bugs. So……

Today marks the official birthday of Microsoft SQL Server 2025. Here’s where to download the evaluation version. Here are the top things you wanna consider as you talk to your managers, developers, and end users. The feature differences between 2025 Enterprise and Standard have been revealed, and the news for Standard Edition folks is spectacular:…

SQL Server 2025 and .NET 10 bring several new improvements to storing JSON natively in the database and querying it quickly. On the SQL Server 2025 side, the two big ones are the new native JSON indexes and the new JSON_CONTAINS function. Let’s see their improvements in action. On the .NET 10 side, EF 10…

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new sys.dm_os_memory_health_history view to make it easier for meatbags like you and robots like Copilot to know if the SQL Server has been under memory pressure recently. To show how it works, let’s run a bunch of simultaneous high-memory-grant queries in the Stack Overflow database: Transact-SQL SELECT TOP 101 *…

The release of SQL Server 2025 keeps inching closer. Release Candidate 0 is out now, and here are the release notes. If you’re planning on replacing your SQL Server 2016 instances (which go out of support next July) with 2025, now would be a good time to start doing functionality testing. As a reminder, here’s…

As the SQL Server 2025 previews continue to come out, Microsoft is making changes that they’re not telling you about. Sometimes these changes never actually go into the final production version, other times they’re held exclusively for the cloud, but sometimes – just sometimes – we get a sneak peek of something Microsoft hasn’t announced…

It’s official: SQL Server 2022 was the last release for SSRS. At SQLBits this week, Microsoft announced that SQL Server 2025 won’t include SSRS. Instead, all SQL Server 2025 customers will get free licensing for the on-premises Power BI Report Server (PBIRS.) The same license key you use to install 2025 will also work to…

About three years ago, SQL Server 2022 introduced Parameter-Sensitive Plan Optimization (PSPO). At the time, I explained that it didn’t work particularly well, and went so far as to pronounce PSPO in a rather unflattering way. I wouldn’t suggest that anyone turn it off – it’s fine, just fine – but it isn’t powerful enough,…

The first public preview of SQL Server 2025 dropped yesterday, and here’s what’s new under the hood as compared to today’s SQL Server 2022 CU19. Forgive me – this is quite a lengthy post, and it’s mostly a data dump. There are new stored procedures, extended stored procs, views, feature switches, new columns in existing…

As we approach the first public releases of SQL Server 2025, it’s fun to start spelunking through things Azure SQL DB has today – announced and unannounced – that aren’t yet present in the boxed product version of SQL Server. Microsoft staff used to say that Azure SQL DB is “the next version” of the…