Voice of the DBA

Tag: Microsoft

  • An SSIS Upgrade

    I came across a post recently on the Microsoft Fabric blog about the evolution of SSIS 2025..I hadn’t heard much about SSIS in SQL Server 2025, so I thought this might provide some info on the investments that Microsoft is still making in Integration Services. I’ve run into a few people in the past year who are still heavily invested in SSIS and run packages daily. SSIS seems to be a technology that isn’t even close to dying for many organizations.

    The blog starts well, delving into the security investments with the change to the SqlClient and TLS 1.3, as well as supporting Strict Encryption. I don’t know many people using this level of security, but it’s good to have SSIS support stronger security. There is also an upgrade for SSIS packages targeting Fabric Data Warehouses if they modify their approach.

    There is also a mention of lift and shift into Fabric Data Factory as an early access program. I wonder how many organizations are looking to still run SSIS packages, but upgrade to Fabric. I’m sure there must be some, and I’m interested if any of you are in this situation. Many of us buy SQL Server licenses, so I would hope Microsoft could invest in a few new SSIS tasks, like SFTP at the least.

    The rest of the post covers Fabric and Azure Data Factory, not SSIS. I understand that Microsoft would prefer everyone abandon SSIS and move to ADF/Fabric, but that’s not what a lot of customers want to do. Many of us have no real need for complexity beyond what SSIS does. What I’d really like to see is a local version of ADF. Many of us still run our own systems and plan to do so for years. If there isn’t going to be an investment in SSIS, which I do understand, then invest in a local version of ADF.

    I doubt Microsoft has much interest in doing work here, especially as the trend towards lakehouses and Parquet files seems to drift further from the idea of SSIS moving data between systems. However, there is still a need for many organizations that might want to build packages to export their data to a data lake on-premises. They might prefer to host their own storage, use Polybase to query those files, and maybe grow into Fabric and Power BI over time.

    Giving options is something Microsoft has often done in the past. Their successes often open the door wider for others to build on their platforms. Their failures are often in places where they try to force everyone to work in a particular way with a particular technology. Expecting everyone to move to ADF/Fabric feels like one of the latter decisions.

    Steve Jones

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  • The Microsoft SQL Year in Review

    Recently, I watched a year in review from Data Exposed, which looked at what’s changed in SQL Server, Azure SQL, and SQL Database in Fabric. This was a lengthy version of the show, just over an hour, though there is a blog to read if you prefer that format. Both look back at the year and what’s changed in the platforms. I’d forgotten about the One SQL aim for Microsoft to allow code to run on-premises, in the cloud, and across the relational and analytical platforms. It’s a good goal, and one I like. That last thing any of us wants to worry about is subtle language changes from one platform to another.

    Bob Ward was a guest early in the show, talking about the new version, SQL Server 2025, and his experiences at Ignite. He noted that while there were many new features that were built, the most exciting things for customers were the changes in the Standard and Express editions. If you haven’t been paying attention, the capacity limits are raised in SQL Server 2025, something many of us have wanted for years. The Standard Edition can now use 32 cores and 256GB of RAM. That’s a welcome doubling of memory and a 50% in cores from SQL Server 2022. Express compute limits are the same, but the database size can grow to 50GB, a welcome increase from the 10GB that has been the limit for years.

    And no price increase, which is helpful when you might be feeling a budget crunch.

    There are quite a few things that have happened in the Data Platform space. When I look at the long list, I see quite a few things I didn’t know about or had forgotten. These aren’t Fabric-specific features, but those that are a part of the SQL space. There are too many things to list, but if you work across Azure SQL and SQL Server, you might take a look to see if there are enhancements that could be useful in your environment.

    During much of the last two years, I have felt Microsoft is completely focused on Fabric and not investing elsewhere, but looking at the review, I see that’s not the case. Fabric seems to gather most of the attention from both engineering and marketing, but there are still lots of investments being made in the SQL platform.

    Steve Jones

  • The Challenge of AI

    In his book, The Coming Wave, the CEO of Microsoft AI laid out the risks of AI tech bluntly. “These tools will only temporarily augment human intelligence. They will make us smarter and more efficient for a time, and will unlock enormous amounts of economic growth, but they are fundamentally labor-replacing,” he wrote. Suleyman advocated for regulatory oversight and other government interventions, such as new taxes on autonomous systems and a universal basic income to prevent a socioeconomic collapse. This book was published before Suleyman joined Microsoft.

    Satya Nadella is more optimistic than his new deputy. In an interview at Microsoft headquarters, while sitting next to his human chief of staff, Nadella said that his Copilot assistants wouldn’t replace his human assistant. As his chief of staff sat typing notes of the conversation on her tablet, Nadella acknowledged that AI will cause “hard displacement and changes in labor pools,” including for Microsoft. Judson Althoff, Chief Commercial Officer, said that Nadella was pressuring his team to find ways to use AI to increase revenue without adding headcount.

    In 2025, Microsoft has reduced quite a bit of its workforce. Over 9,000 earlier this year, though perhaps there will be some hiring in the future, according to Nadella. Nadella contends that AI could end up delivering more societal benefits than the Industrial Revolution did. “When you create abundance,” Nadella said, “then the question is what one does with that abundance to create more surplus.”

    As I discuss AI with different people, I get wildly different opinions. The pace of GenAI model growth across the last two years has led quite a few people to believe that the technology will approach mimicking the average human’s intelligence in just a few years. That’s a scary thought, and it certainly could lead a lot of executives to place a bet on fewer human employees and more digital ones.

    However, many more people believe that the GenAI models still need a lot of guidance, and they are best suited for partnerships with humans. That’s good, in a sense. If a smart or talented human can use an AI partner and get a lot done, that means we still need some humans.

    Some.

    That use of AI by a few talented people might also lead us to a reduction in labor for a lot of organizations. Maybe fewer humans get more done with AI, and it’s possible organizations want to make that trade. It’s easy to think we’ll find things for more humans to do, but computers are incredible levers, and this worries me.

    A little.

    What I also think is that there is so much work we’d like to get done, but we can’t, at least in the technology space. We don’t have enough people to do the work, so GenAI agents or partners working with humans might let us catch up on the backlogs we have.

    Of course, I don’t know that all that backlogged software we went is something we need, if it’s good for the world, and if it will end up putting even more people in the real world out of work.

    Lots of challenges ahead. Let me know what you think.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • 50 Years of Microsoft

    I get the Gates Notes email periodically and I always find it interesting to read. Like Bill Gates or not, he is a very smart individual and has thoughtful things to say. Even when I don’t always agree with him, I enjoy hearing his view and have enjoyed seeing him deliver presentations. In fact, one of my career highlights was at SQL Saturday #175 – Fargo, held at the MS campus. Bill Gates was speaking to employees that day and we were allowed to watch the Q&A from the balcony. Later, I saw him start to leave and stop by a sign. He asked someone about SQL Saturday. When they explained the idea for free conferences, he said “that’s cool.”

    One of the recent emails talked about the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, with the original source code available for a BASIC interpreter. It’s an interesting read to me, since I learned BASIC first (and a little assembler) on an Apple II and a TRS-80. I didn’t start a company, but I certainly appreciate the excitement of tackling a programming challenge back then when memory and disk were in short supply. Most of my early programming tasks had me worried about how much memory and disk I was using, trying desperately to minimize both.

    My first real exposure to Microsoft technology came after college, while working at a power utility. We had DOS desktops and were just starting to look at Windows 3.1. Until that point, I’d mostly lived in the Apple II space and then the mainframe/Unix space. I coveted a SparcStation with SunOS and had to settle for a PC architecture because my newly graduated budget wouldn’t support anything from SUN.

    I adapted to DOS and grew to enjoy the challenges of early Windows. I adopted Win95, learned SQL Server (OS/2 and Windows NT) and the rest is history for me. I’ve been using Microsoft technologies for 33 years now, and I’ve enjoyed the time using those tools. I also appreciate the great career that Microsoft gave me.

    Looking back at the times I had to work with autoexec.bat and config.sys files, when I used the probe account in early SQL Servers to check configurations, learning to track and read disk configurations for SQL Server 6.5 restores, moving from Windows NT 3.1 to 4.0 to the more modern architectures of Windows 2000 and beyond. Watching the “Visual” series of development tools and the Win32 API evolve into the .NET namespaces and the introduction of PowerShell to give us an easier way of working with non-compiled scripts. These are fun memories for me to look back on.

    Most of you reading this likely use some sort of Microsoft technology. What good (or bad) memories do you have?

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.