Voice of the DBA

Tag: T-SQL Tuesday

  • 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.

  • T-SQL Tuesday #191: Invitation–Your Favorite String Parsing

    It’s that time of the month, and I’m late. My apologies. I had a mix-up with a host and was on vacation all last week, so no invite.

    I’m extending T-SQL Tuesday #191 a week to have people write on Oct 21, 2025. My apologies. The invite is below, something that’s been on my mind with all the AI work I’ve been doing, but I thought I’d ask about something more SQL related.

    I’m looking for hosts for 2026. Blogging is a great way to grow your brand and help you impress potential future employers.

    Your Favorite String Parsing Routines

    One of the things that I’ve had to do a log in my career is parse strings in different ways. It seems our customers constantly find new ways to stick data into a string that we would prefer to have normalized in some way for searching, indexing, etc.

    As a few examples, we might get someone who creates a PO that looks like 20260720321433, where there’s a year/month to start and then a number. We might need to parse either the number or the date from the field to determine when or which count of a PO someone has made. Other examples might be someone putting “Sam Jones” in the last name (surname) column because there isn’t a middle name space. We might need to get just the last name out of the field.

    This year (2025) I’ve been using AI often to try and get data from various structures, often PDFs or more complex formats, but I have managed to ask AI to change a bunch of data in a field across different rows rather than try and work out some RegEx search and replace. That got me thinking.

    What are your favorite string parsing routines that have helped you handle complex situations? That’s your invite for Oct 2025. Write on a way that you’ve handled parsing (and maybe replacing values) in complex strings.

    I see questions on things all the time at SQL Server Central. A few examples:

    • [Doe, Jane E] [Doe Smith, Jane E] (get the without middle/initials/etc)
    • [Hello5-E-100] (get the final number)
    • 192.168.1.100 – parse IPv4 (or v6) addresses
    • Parse XML for a value
    • Parse JSON for a value
    • [8/9/08 – out for upgrade; 8/16/08 returned to inventory. 8/31/2008 – deployed to field] – parse out all the dates

    Write on Oct 21, 2025, a week late, and post a comment on this post linking back to your entry. I’ll compile everything next week for the roundup. The rules:

    • Publish the post before 2025-10-21 11:59:59
    • Include the logo above
    • Link the logo to this invite
    • Make a comment on this post (or trackback/linkback)