On July 14, 2026, Microsoft's extended support ends for SQL Server 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:
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.
The Meltdown and Spectre attacks are newly announced ways of hacking CPUs. They affect both Windows and Linux. If you're running under virtualization or cloud IaaS, any other running guest can try to leverage the attacks to compromise your unrelated guest.
These are a really big deal.
sp_BlitzWho is our open source replacement for sp_who and sp_who2. It has all kinds of really neat-o outputs like how many degrees of parallelism the query is using, how much memory it's been granted, how long it's been waiting for memory grants, and much more.
If you're on SQL Server 2016 SP1 or newer, it can show you a query's live execution plan from sys.dm_exec_query_statistics_xml.
