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Question of the Day

Getting the Schema for Tables

The Voice of the DBA

An Unexciting Exciting Release

SQL Server 2025 was released this week. The announcement came at Ignite and the PASS Data Community Summit with keynotes on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. While there are some things to look forward to in the release (What's New) and some highlights from T-SQL Tuesday this week, it seems that this release wasn't a very exciting one.

On one hand, I blame all the Microsoft Fabric focus, which seems to distract from the core product that powers the databases at many organizations. The SQL Server blog from Microsoft has had relatively few posts this year, highlighting a few things. The Fabric blog gets more posts, which is something I've seen at Database Weekly as well. As I curate the content during my week, I find a lot more Fabric-focused content than SQL Server-specific posts. That contributes to a lack of excitement for a new version of SQL Server.

On the other hand, SQL Server is a very mature product and most of us use it daily, depend on it, and feel comfortable with the way it works. While some of us want changes, bugs fixed or features enhanced, for the most part, I find many clients expect it to just work and don't have time to refactor code to use new features. A few also are nervous about using features until they've been in a few versions, as we sometimes see features released with limited functionality and few enhancements (*cough* these tables *cough* or these ones).

At the same time, the What's New page has a lot of stuff listed. If not more than SQL Server 2022 and 2019, it's in more categories. Maybe it's just that the documentation writers are more verbose? Perhaps, but I see lots of things I hadn't noticed before in announcements. RegEx and the AI capabilities have dominated a lot of the news/blogs/etc., but the Change event streaming, native support for parquet/Delta, AG control flow, backup on secondaries, ADR for tempdb, and more are there. Plus, quite a few security enhancements to let us work with managed identities.

When I really look at the product, there are things to be excited about, probably at least a couple for most people. At the same time, it has seemed like many people, including me, aren't necessarily overly excited about upgrading systems to a new version when much of our code won't change.

Maybe because no one lets us, or gives us time to, change code to use new features.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

Featured Contents

UNLOGGED Tables in PostgreSQL: When Speed Matters More Than Durability

Chandan Shukla from SQLServerCentral

Learn about unlogged tables and how they work in PostgreSQL.

JSON Data Extract from SQL Server 2025

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

JSON is a complex data type used for representing objects with various properties. With JSON you follow the key-value pattern where the key is a string and the value can be of different data types. What are some common ways to work with JSON in SQL Server?

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - SQL Server Database Migration Pitfalls

peter.skoglund from SQL Development Wizard

SQL Server Database Migration Pitfalls (and How to Fix Them)
Database migrations are where great product ideas go to die—unless you plan for SQL Server’s quirks and the realities of...

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There are some fundamental boxes that your reporting system must tick. ✅ The figures must be accurate A good reporting solution can be trusted. A bad one causes confusion...

Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design

Site Owners from SQLServerCentral

Refactoring has proven its value in a wide range of development projects–helping software professionals improve system designs, maintainability, extensibility, and performance.

Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):
	Getting the Schema for Tables
What happens when I run this on SQL Server 2022 in the AdventureWorks2022 database? SELECT OBJECT_DEFINITION (OBJECT_ID(N'Person.Person')) AS [Object Definition]; GO
Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Specifying the Collation

I am dealing with issues on my SQL Server 2022 instance related to collation. I have an instance collation of Latin1_General_CS_AS_KS_WS, but a database collation of Latin1_General_CI_AS.

I want to force a few queries to run with a specified collation by using code like this:

DECLARE @c VARCHAR(20) = 'Latin1_General_CI_AS'

SELECT  p.PersonType,
        p.Title,
        p.LastName,
        c.CustomerID,
        c.AccountNumber
 FROM Person.Person AS p
 INNER JOIN Sales.Customer AS c
 ON c.PersonID = p.BusinessEntityID
 COLLATE @c

Will this solve my problem?

Answer: No

Explanation: This won't solve your problem. The value used in a COLLATE clause must be a literal, not a variable. Ref: COLLATE - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/collations?view=sql-server-ver17

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

SQL Server 2019 - Administration

Columnstore index question - Hi experts, I’ve been going through several articles and videos about Columnstore indexes, but I haven’t been able to find clear answers—so I wanted to ask here. I have a table (a heap, with no nonclustered indexes either) that contains about 110 million records. There’s a job that runs once a week with this query(with […]

SQL Server 2019 - Development

Need to overload tempdb - Yes, you read that title correctly. I have a somewhat hilarious problem. We have some queries that are overloading tempdb which fills up the drive and brings everything to a halt. This is a reporting server, not OLTP, so we've been given permission from the application owner to kill all queries that fill up the […]

Analysis Services

Member was not found in the cube when the string - Hey, I've not done a cube for many years but I find myself supporting a colleague troubleshoot why his Cube "Timesheet" isn't processing. The error I'm getting is: The '[2025-11-11 09:00:00]' member was not found in the cube when the string, [Instruction Date].[By Calendar].[Date].[2025-11-11 09:00:00], was parsed. On the face of it I expected the […]

Editorials

Being Mindful of Design Time - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Being Mindful of Design Time

Internal Staff Growth - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Internal Staff Growth.

Do You Really Need HA? - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Do You Really Need HA?

SQLServerCentral.com Test Forum

Trying a new post to see what happens - is this visible? select @@version

Administration

Cannot get KB959420 - Hi, we lost our sever sql2000 To restore database to a new one we need fix KB959420 because system dbs require same version. I cannot find KB959420 anywhere Can anyone help me? Thanks Fabio

Article Discussions by Author

Getting the Object Code - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Getting the Object Code

T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Concatenating Strings - Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Concatenating Strings

Identify a Slipstream Installation - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Identify a Slipstream Installation

Implementing PostgreSQL with Python for Real-Time Logging and Monitoring - Comments posted to this topic are about the item Implementing PostgreSQL with Python for Real-Time Logging and Monitoring

SQL Server 2025 Unveiled: The AI-Ready Enterprise Database with Microsoft Fabric Integration - Comments posted to this topic are about the item SQL Server 2025 Unveiled: The AI-Ready Enterprise Database with Microsoft Fabric Integration

The New Database CheckDB - Comments posted to this topic are about the item The New Database CheckDB

SQL Server 2022 - Administration

Transactional Replication - Recently stood up a 2022 Enterprise server. Have 8 publications with subscriptions on a SQL 2019 server for reporting purposes. 7 of the publications work as expected, the 8th does the snapshot, but fails when populating the subscriber. It fails on the same table/file every time and moves on to the next file if I […]

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