Microsoft SQL Server in practice: installation, Always On availability groups, backup and restore, performance tuning, security, PowerShell automation, SQL Server on Linux and upgrades.
You will find a new connectivity and drivers landing page for SQL Server with .Net, Java, Python, C++, Go and PHP languages: SQL Connectivity and Drivers – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn As you can see, you can download, have a quick start and some code samples… Let’s test on Python! When I click on “Download”, I have the page…
With the latest version of SSMS, SSMS 21, there is now integration with Copilot. In this blog post, we’ll go through the setup step by step, with screenshots, to get everything ready to use Copilot in SSMS.There is already some official documentation on this, but I believe many people will find it clearer to see everything illustrated. Copilot is not…
The last version of” MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code” has in Preview “the Local SqlServer Containers” based on SQL Server 2025 with the following keys: See all Preview Features here First Step: Download and install Visual Studio Code here Second Step: Download and install MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code here You can also directly from Visual Code, download…
I’m looking back on three amazing days of interesting technical insights from the SQLBits event 2025 in London. It’s actually my first time having the pleasure of attending one of Europe’s biggest data platform events and I can sincerely say, that I enjoyed every minute of interesting workshops and sessions all around Data management, Data engineering and analytics with the…
Like every time with a new version of SQL Server, it’s good to see what the new configurations possibilities are for us to manage the instance. To do this, I will compare SQL 2022 and SQL 2025 using the system view sys.configurations. I begin with a count(*) to see how many differences I have: 95 configurations for SQL 2022 and…
Microsoft has announced the end of the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) service. In other words, Microsoft will no longer provide new versions of SSRS. Currently, the latest available version is the 2022 version (https://www.microsoft.com/fr-FR/download/details.aspx?id=104502). However, it is important to note that this service will be supported until January 11, 2033. Moreover, it will still be possible to use SSRS…
This week, I’m in London attending the SQLBits 2025 conference.Since joining dbi services as a consultant, this is my second time taking part in the event. The last time was in 2022, but I attended remotely due to the uncertainties surrounding international travel at the time, as COVID-19 was still a concern.You can actually find the blog post I wrote…
Before addressing the issue of backup size reduction with compression enabled, let me provide some context. When SQL Server is hosted on AWS EC2 instances, you’ll need to manage the backup strategy appropriate to your business. In order to persist and archive your SQL Server backups securely and permanently, AWS S3 is a prime target: it’s the service with the…
SQL Server 2025 preview has been publicly available for a week now: you can find all the details in this blog “SQL Server 2025 Public Preview and SSMS 21 now available“.In this blog, I want to make an highlight on one Engine High Availability (HA) feature: Availability Group Commit Time. For a little background, Always On Availability Group (AG) is…
Backup operations can increase significantly I/O and even CPU utilization when we use backup compression. To avoid using resources on primary replica, offloading backups to a synchronized or synchronizing replicas seems to be the good solution even if we have some limitations.For the time being, supported backups on a secondary replicas are: So we cannot perform: Those limitations may cause…
Introduction SQL Server 2025 introduces a new algorithm for backup compression: ZSTD. As a result, SQL Server 2025 now offers three solutions for backup compression: In this blog, we will compare MS_XPRESS and ZSTD. Environment To perform these tests, the following virtual machine was used: Additionally, I used the StackOverflow database to run the backup tests (reference: https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2015/10/how-to-download-the-stack-overflow-database-via-bittorrent/). ZSTD usage…
Introduction The arrival of SQL Server 2025 introduces the Standard Developer edition, allowing companies to deploy across all development, quality and testing environments using an edition equivalent to the Standard Edition without having to pay the associated licensing fees. Here are the different editions available in SQL Server 2025: What problem does this solve? Some companies deploy the Developer edition…
