SQL Pass Summit 2018: SQL Server 2019 features coming soon!

It’s the 20th anniversary of the event and the keynote today was amazing (see the blog from Christophe) for different reasons but the more important is that is every time better people. Not only DBA’s but also people using their application connected to the database.
Today, one of my focus will be the next version of SQL Server 2019 with the session of Bob Ward, Asad Khan & Amit Banerjee from Microsoft.

I already tested some new features and wrote about it, but it’s really good to see a session about SQL Server 2019 and to discover new features that can help us.
Before writing about the session, I refer the keynote few minutes demo done by Bob Ward & Connor Cunningham and I will share this with you because today it’s not available in the CPT. It will be in the future release of SQL Server. The problem is if you have a huge workload and Tempdb is solicited. You notice in tempdb that only sys tables are the cause…What can we do? We do not have access to these tables, they are internal… And Connor comes with an update of SQL Server and it was fix! AMAZING…It’s really a dream for us!!! Connor explained that the SQLServer development Team developed a solution using in-memory technology and put sys tables in-memory to avoid this problem. This is illustrated in the picture as “tempdb: it Juts Runs Faster” and is part of the Intelligent Query Processing like Memory Grant Feedback or Adaptive Joins already available in SQL Server 2017 in the Adaptive Query Processing family.
The name is also changing from Adaptive to Intelligent! 😆 
After this future new feature, let’s focus on the Roadmap for SQL Server: Inside SQL Server 2019.
I will not write about features already in the CPT but features coming soon.
On the security I’m very curious to test the “Static Data masking”.
We will be able to mask data to users with admin access.
It can useful doing a copy from prod to dev for developers having db_owner role…  they won’t see the data in dev! Perfect for us!

On the High Availability topic, they announced that system databases can be finally in Availability Groups. You cannot imaging the joy that this announcement does for all of us!
The other news is the Accelerated Data Recovery. This new feature helps in case of a rollback from a large query to come faster in the precedent state. I was in a session explaining how it’s working and it was very interesting and I’m excited to test it on-premises.

During the demo at the keynote, Bob used a new function that I find very useful, it is fn_ PageResCracker associated to the DMV dm_db_page_info to troubleshoot page resource.

And to finish, the last slide of the presentation shows the next direction of SQL Server.
Dbi services SQL Server Team will be happy to test all these new features and blog about them!