Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • A Note and a Message: T-SQL Tuesday #193

    This month Mike Walsh hosts T-SQL Tuesday. It’s been quite some time since he hosted (back at #4), but he answered my call for hosts and I appreciate that. He has a really good end of year invitation that asks us to look to the past and the future.

    I’m trying to keep T-SQL Tuesday alive, but I’ve been struggling for hosts. I need more of you to host, and more people to blog.

    Blogging is incredible for your career. Take some time to get started, and if you do nothing but respond to these monthly blog parties, you’ll look better than most other candidates for jobs.

    If you want to host, ping me on X or at sjones at sqlservercentral dot ***.

    A Message to Steve in 2015

    The world seems to be changing quite quickly in in our lives. You bought a new Pebble watch this year, database automation is becoming a bigger part of your job, and there’s lots of data analysis you can do.

    Power Bi is a tool from Microsoft that is going to grow in popularity and it’s a place you ought to invest. New places to store data, new features in SQL Server, new platforms for building analytics will appear, but Power BI is a place you should spend more time in and improve your DAX skills.

    Learning to build better visualizations, especially for your volleyball coaching (which is going to continue for some time), is an investment that will really pay off in the future.

    A Word from the Future in 2035

    Steve,

    we spent a lot of time early in our career working with networks, helping manage accounts, users, security, privileges, and more. That knowledge and experience helped us understand SQL Server and other database platforms as well from the security standpoint.

    Starting in 2026, you need to revisit some of those skills, ensure you better understand how authorization and authentication works in the context of AI and agents. AI technology is changing the world, and it’s going to be heavily used by agents, but security and ensuring there are limits placed on them is going to define who has more success with AI and who has more trouble.

    Take the time to ensure that as you engage with MCP servers, task agents with work, and evolve the way you use AI that you include governance in your efforts to protect yourself from runaway agents that might go beyond what you expect, or spend more money than you want them to spend.

    Enjoy the next decade, it’s going to be amazing.

  • 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)