We have a hybrid approach. I prefer working at the office, but I only have a commute of 15 minutes and my home isn't really setup for remote work.

Many work...

We began switching to c# scripts in SSIS to parse the excel and output the required columns

As SSIS get a litte love lately, thinking of moving to c#, powershell. We don't have very complicated workloads and excel is being read by a c# script inside SSIS

Thanks for sharing

A little late for the preview of the SQL 2025 feature list:

https://www.brentozar.com/archive/2025/04/whats-new-in-sql-server-2025-2/

It will, all the new students basically grow up with GenAI,

That were AI may come in handy to manage the complexity

Thanks for mentioning the new interesting commands.

According to https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/functions/jaro-winkler-distance-transact-sql?view=azuresqldb-current it's still in preview

Times flies, thanks for the reminder. Didn't switch yet to 2022

Had to create a custom role on the resourcegroup https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/database-import?view=azuresql&tabs=azure-powershell

Instant file initialization in sql 2022? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/databases/database-instant-file-initialization?view=sql-server-ver16

However the latency points to hardware ( perhaps an ssd buffer got full, your sql server got migrated to slower storage due inactivity ...)

Probably switch to PostGres or start developing again

Using some crude tracking with SP_DATABASE_TABLE_SIZE. Lately switched to extended events database file changes to identify the culprit or using query story to find the queries just before that happened

The newer os requires you to use administrative privileges (UAC). Run explorer as administrator

cmd (run as administrator)
explorer (this will be started as administrator)

explore

4 TB SQL backup may take a long time

Have you looked at backup snapshot technologies? Like Veeam / SAN ...