Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • The Roundup for T-SQL Tuesday #192

    Last week I asked you to write about SQL Server 2025 and what things you might be looking forward to in the new version.

    First, as usual, is Rob Farley. He has an advantage, being in Australia, so his day starts earlier than most. His post this month is on string matching, and he is sad that Master Data Services is leaving in 2025. I’m not sure many people used it, but I also don’t know it was worth removing. However, there are new functions for fuzzy string matching, which are some options for helping with data quality.

    Chad write about something I’ve been asking Microsoft about for years. We are finally getting a Standard Edition version of Developer Edition. Chad writes in more detail about this and how to install it.

    Deborah writes about two features: optimized locking and ADR. Performance is always on the mind of most people who work with databases, and these two features should help improve performance.

    Andy has written on a few AI things in SQL Server 2025, so I expected more. However, I got an AG enhancement I wasn’t aware of that is coming.

    Rob in New Zealand writes about security changes in SQL Server 2025, but also notes that the Copilot Integration in SSMS 22 is really what he is looking forward to working with.

    My own post was on the backup changes, letting me backup on all replicas.

    Louis writes about regex. I was expecting more people to choose this, but glad Louis did.

    Glad to see a few people participating. If I missed you, please send me a note with the link.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #192: SQL Server 2025 Backup Changes


    I hosted this month, but I decided to put my own entry in as well. There are more things in this release than I expected, probably because of the overwhelming focus on Fabric from Microsoft that has drowned out other changes.

    I’ve been a DBA (or Ops manager) for quite a bit of my career, and one of the things I’ve thought was top priority was backups. I always want to be sure I have a recovery strategy, because if I don’t, nothing matters. Things go wrong and systems fail and I need to protect systems.

    Security is a close second, but backups really matter.

    I was excited to see that full and differential backups can be set on secondary replicas in AGs. To be fair, I had assumed this would be working by SQL Server 2022, but I hadn’t checked. Glad it’s been added. I know, I know, I questioned if you need HA, but that’s more a staffing question than one of whether HA makes sense in general.

    Backups, especially on larger systems, can be a load on the server. We’ve seen this with compressed backups natively, or with something like SQL Backup. As a result, offloading this to another system is something I’d want to do.

    Of course, there’s still the challenge of making sure you get these all organized in one place (don’t have the 1 copy of your diff only on one secondary), but that’s a separate post.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #192 Invitation: SQL Server 2025 Excitement

    It’s that time of the month again, and once again, I’m late and I’m hosting. I was traveling a lot in October and didn’t sort out hosting for this month. I have someone for Dec, and am looking for more in 2026. This will be a focus for me in December this.

    My apologies, and I’ll try to do better.

    Without further ago, …

    The Invitation

    Next week many of us are expecting to see SQL Server 2025 released to the public. The RC0 has been out for awhile and slowly we see people testing it. Even Brent has a server being monitored that’s a 2025 instance. Between Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit, it has to release then, right?

    We’ll see.

    In any case, there are some interesting changes, including some language changes. While SQL Server is a mature product, and you might not be that excited, I’m wondering if there is anything that you’re looking forward to working on?

    I’ve got a few ideas, but let me know what things in SQL Server will make your job easier, please your customers/clients, or maybe generate a little excitement in your life.

    A few topics:

    • AI capabilities being added to SQL Server
    • Change Event Streaming
    • RegEx
    • JSON enhancements
    • Batch Mode improvements
    • AG enhancements
    • Security changes for managed identities
    • Password policy on Linux
    • ADR in tempdb

    There’s plenty more, so start writing and publish next week, Nov 11. Here are a few more rules.

      • Publish the post sometimes on 2025-11-11
      • Include the logo above
      • Link the logo to this invite
      • Make a comment on this post (or trackback/linkback)

  • T-SQL Tuesday #191 Round Up

    I hosted this month, late as it turns out, but we still had a few entries. Here’s a look at the blogs people published.

    First as always, Rob Farley writes about the complexity of string parsing, using TVFs. He also shows some of the performance implications of complex parsing. Thanks to Rob for reminding me to get the invite out.

    Louis Davidson wrote about parsing HTML, which is definitely a challenge in T-SQL given the nature of the language and how embedded different tags can be. I’ve done this a little, and I prefer using Python to do this Winking smile

    Courtney Woolum writes about working with the IMDB database and needing to parse comma separated data with STRING_SPLIT and APPLY.

    Lucas Kartawidjaja brings us a look at a data outside SQL Server using the Log Parser, a free CLI tool from Microsoft that works well with data outside of SQL Server.

    Andy Brownsword tries out the new RegEx functions in SQL Server 2025.

    Hugo Kornelis hates intelligent keys because they store different types of data in the same column. He also shows some PARSENAME and CHARINDEX tricks.