Every year, Aaron Bertrand runs a curling tournament up in scenic North Bay where he grew up. I joined in this year, and before the tournament, sat on the shores of Lake Napissing to answer your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/49Ycmorwk_g
One of the things I love about TikTok is that it exposes me to wildly new video ideas like this:
https://www.tiktok.com/@tiipititap/video/7468701529252351262
I'm doing a lot of travel this month, but I took a break in my Vegas backyard to go through the top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://youtu.be/3ez2m-Hev9E
This year's release of Microsoft's enterprise-grade relational database focuses on the most highly requested features from customers. Highlights include:
Tooling support for SSMS like adding the debugger back in and executing the query where your cursor is on
Production DBA enhancements like the ability to restore a single table from backup, and automatic background corruption checks
New investments in SQL Server Reporting Services, like a report viewer for .NET Core
T-SQL enhancements like DISTINCT support in STRING_AGG and enhanced NoSQL support
I'm back home after a 2-week Iceland vacation. Let's catch up with your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV6MuFQkf5k
For this week's Query Exercise, your mission had two parts:
Do a first pass search through the Users table looking for columns where people had snuck in email addresses where they didn't belong
Write a more high-quality query to identify exactly which rows we needed to handle
tl;dr: if you use Azure SQL DB Hyperscale's auto-scaling, it's probably not cutting your bill down because like SQL Server, Hyperscale doesn't automatically relinquish memory, and it'll be up to you to manually manage your own memory if you wanna cut your bill.
Now for the long story.
While waiting for my Husavik hot tub to fill up, I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0chyzVLFYw
Regular expressions are a way of doing complex string searches. They can be really useful, but they have a reputation: they're hard to write, hard to read, and they're even harder to troubleshoot. Once you master 'em, though, they come in handy for very specific situations.
This post isn't about their complexity, though. This post is about Azure SQL DB & SQL Server 2025's regex performance.
Personally identifiable information (PII) is freakin' everywhere.
When companies first start looking to identify and lock down their data, they think it's going to be as easy as identifying common columns like EmailAddress, DateOfBirth, SocialSecurityNumber, and so forth. They think, "We'll just encrypt those columns and we'll be fine."
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…
I'm in Iceland this week, land of fire and ice, a place I keep coming back to over the years. It's one of my favorite places on earth with stunning scenery, nice folks, and great restaurants. I paused at Godafoss to take your top-voted questions from Pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGoE17cSdl8
When you think 'beach chair', this probably isn't what you think. I'm at a black sand beach on the south coast of Iceland, answering your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j4TIuC54ak
Over the last several years, Microsoft has been putting less and less effort into Cumulative Update documentation. We used to get full-blown knowledge base articles about fixes, but these days, we get a collection of footnotes with deceiving hyperlinks that look like they're going to lead to more information - but they simply lead back to themselves.
You're looking at a wide table with 100-200 columns.
Years ago, it started as a "normal" table with maybe 10-20, but over the years, people kept gradually adding one column after another. Now, this behemoth is causing you problems because:
Meet my latest toy, a 1991 Honda Beat! I introduce it, then take your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkeEKyzc01M
I certainly don't discuss it often, and it's been a few years since I wrote about my pansexuality. I hope you'll forgive me for talking a little about it today. I promise not to make it a habit. A friend of mine recently asked me privately, "Why would people ever talk about their sexuality publicly?…
I took your top-voted questions from https://pollgab.com/room/brento and answered 'em from my balcony at Disney's Aulani Resort in Hawaii. I'm not really a Disney guy - we were there for a friend's birthday celebration - but I tell ya what, that's my new favorite resort in the world. The water park, food, beach, and nearby activities were great, and it has the awesome Disney service. Top notch. Anyhoo, back to tech:
Last week I wrote about the 6 best things Microsoft ever did to SQL Server, but now we gotta pull up a chair and discuss the stinkers. To be fair, I excluded anything that's basically ANSI standard. I'm sorry that you don't like functions and cursors, but the reality is that Microsoft adds that stuff…
Every quarter, we publish adoption rate data showing how quickly people are adopting new versions of SQL Server. Today it's time for the winter 2025 version of our SQL ConstantCare® population report.
SQL Server 2022 is finally seeing some good adoption with about 21% of the market. It's gradually taking market share from all other versions, including 2019, but 2019 still dominates with 44% of the market:
