SQL Server

For the final release of SQL Server 2022, Microsoft popped a surprise that wasn’t in the release candidates: Your choices are: Install a free edition: Evaluation (which times out after 180 days), Developer (which isn’t allowed to be used for production purposes), or Express (which is limited to small databases & hardware resources) Use pay-as-you-go-billing,…

Microsoft released SQL Server 2022 today, November 16, 2022. The footnotes indicate: SQL Server 2022 free editions (Developer edition, Express edition) are available to download starting today. SQL Server 2022 paid editions (Enterprise edition, Standard edition) will be available in Volume Licensing (Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Agreement Subscriptions) customers starting today, which represents the majority of…

Microsoft has an official list of what’s new in 2022 overall, but here I’m specifically focusing on system objects that might be interesting to script developers like you and I, dear reader. New stored procedure sp_get_table_card_est_and_avg_col_len – I assume the “card” refers to statistics and cardinality, not Hallmark. SQL Server has historically struggled with memory…

SQL Server 2014’s end of support date is coming in less than two years: July 9, 2024. I know that sounds far-off right now, but consider the work you have to do between now and then: Pick a new version to migrate to Set up development SQL Servers for that new version Start developing &…

I love how Microsoft treats deprecated and discontinued features in SQL Server. No, seriously. I give Microsoft a lot of sarcasm and lip around here, but Microsoft takes serious care to make it easy to upgrade versions without worrying about your application breaking. If you disagree, hear me out for a minute. “Discontinued” means it’s…

Last week, I challenged y’all to come up with slogans for SQL Server 2022. I have to confess that when I came up with the idea for that blog post, I thought y’all would take it seriously. I thought you’d come up with ideas that were meant to show off Microsoft’s hard work. I should…

Normally when y’all post questions here on Pollgab, I let ’em pile up and I eventually do an Office Hours webcast where I talk through my answers. I check in on the list every couple of days just out of curiosity, though, and one of ’em jumped right out at me. The question, posed by…

Brent Ozar, bearer of bad news Who am I kidding? You’re not really going to get ready, but let’s talk about this anyway. SQL Server 2016 mainstream support ends Tuesday, July 13, 2021. According to Microsoft’s SQL Server support policy, that means from here on out, Microsoft will only deliver security patches, not functional, performance,…