Author Archives: johnsterrett

SQL Server 2025: Is the Upgrade Worth the Money?

Posted on February 13, 2026 | Leave a comment
SQL Server 2025 Upgrade: What your CFO Needs to Know

SQL Server 2025 was released in November of 2025. The issue I’ve found is that reviews of SQL Server 2025 that showcase the business impact of the upgrade are hard to find and don’t focus solely on its technical aspects. Developers and Data Engineers are thrilled with the new features and upgrades it offers, and you can find plenty of their reviews on YouTube and in their blogs. But if you’re the owner of a company or need your CFO to approve the purchase of this upgrade, you need to know exactly what it will do for your bottom line and your customers.

As the CEO of ProcureSQL, I am responsible for ensuring our clients achieve the highest return on their SQL Server investments. Today, I’m here to speak with decision-makers who are wondering whether SQL Server 2025 is worth the financial investment.

Changes with Express, Web, Standard, and Developer Editions: That Impact Licensing Costs

Microsoft has restructured its edition model with SQL Server 2025, delivering significant improvements for organizations that do not plan to upgrade to Enterprise Edition.

SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition Changes

The Standard edition increased the number of CPU cores from 24 in 2022 to 32 in 2025. With SQL Server 2022, list pricing is $15,123 per 2-core pack for Enterprise Edition and $3,945 per 2-core pack for Standard Edition. With official 2025 pricing at the same rate for Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition, organizations previously forced into Enterprise Edition can potentially save up to $179,000 on a 32-core deployment.

Edition List price per core (USD) Cores Total license cost (USD)
SQL Server 2025 Enterprise $7,562 32 $241,984
SQL Server 2025 Standard $1,973 32 $63,136
Estimated Savings with Standard $178,848

The memory limitation was also increased from 128GB of RAM in SQL Server 2022 to 256GB of RAM in SQL Server 2025. While there has never been a cap on database size in Standard Edition, the number of data pages that can stay in memory has doubled. The increased limitations on CPU and Memory alone should allow your team to process and analyze data faster if you are using the Standard edition of SQL Server and are upgrading to SQL Server 2025.  

SQL Server 2025 Standard Edition picks up full Resource Governor support, including the new TempDB governance capabilities. You can define resource pools and workload groups to route sessions and limit or reserve CPU and Memory grants, and throttle I/O requests. Combined with the core and memory increases, Resource Governor enables workload consolidation on Standard Edition that previously required Enterprise Edition.

Starting with SQL Server 2025, Power BI Report Server is included with both Standard and Enterprise editions and no longer requires Software Assurance on those 2025 licenses. Previously, it required Enterprise core licenses with active Software Assurance. For organizations currently paying for Enterprise Edition + Software Assurance solely for using Power BI Report Server, this change can result in substantial cost savings.

SQL Server 2025 Express Edition Changes

The Express Edition of SQL Server has always been free, but the 2022 version limits users to 10 GB per database. It was good for applications with very low consumption and computing requirements. SQL Server 2025 Express Edition increases that limit fivefold, to 50 GB per database. While still limited, this is good for datasets that fit within the increased size constraint and for scenarios where a company might not want to pay for the standard version yet.

SQL Server 2025 Upgrade Roadblockers

There are two notable trade‑offs to be aware of before you look at the benefits. Web Edition is discontinued, so if you were using it, you will have to move to another edition when you upgrade. Organizations currently on Web Edition should be aware that there is no direct equivalent at the same price point. Standard Edition is substantially more expensive. In SQL Server 2025, Express Edition loses reporting rights entirely with the conversion of Reporting Services to Power BI Report Server.

An Important Edition Change in SQL Server 2025

Microsoft also implemented an important solution for companies that do not plan to upgrade from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition. Microsoft finally opened up the Developer Edition (free for anyone who wants to use it for non-production purposes) to let you choose between both Standard and Enterprise editions. This matters to you because previously, your development team might have used the Developer Edition in non-production and then used features that only worked in the Enterprise Edition in production. This required you to either spend more money by upgrading from Standard Edition to Enterprise Edition or, worse, identify these errors and make quick, critical code changes after you deployed to production.

Now, if you are developing or testing an application, and you know the production workload will use Standard Edition, you can install Developer Standard Edition so the functionality is the same as what you would get with Standard Edition in Production. That way, you don’t have to worry about using features that either won’t work or have a different behavior than you would see from the Enterprise edition.

SQL Server 2025 Upgrade: Security Enhancements That Save You Money

Every SQL login you retire lowers your breach exposure; even a single incident can easily cost more than your entire SQL Server upgrade. Moving to Entra ID and managed identities is cheaper than the cost of a serious breach. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, global averages are now at 4.44 million USD per incident and over 10.22 million USD in the U.S. That’s why it’s worth spending a moment on Entra ID Managed Identities.

SQL Server 2025 introduces native support for Microsoft Entra ID Managed Identities when you connect SQL Server to Azure with Azure Arc. Managed identities are arguably the biggest security advancement for on-prem SQL Servers in years. When you connect your SQL Server 2025 instance to Azure Arc, a system-assigned managed identity is automatically created for the host machine. You then associate that identity with the SQL Server instance.

The benefit is twofold. Managed Identities greatly improve both inbound and outbound authentication. External users and applications authenticate to SQL Server via Microsoft Entra ID. This can allow you to move from SQL authentication (the worst option for inbound authentication) to Entra ID with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Single Sign-On (SSO), and conditional access. For outbound authentication, SQL Server authenticates to Azure Blob Storage, Azure Key Vault, and other Azure services without storing credentials in config files or connection strings.

“For most organizations, the security and productivity gains here are measured in millions of dollars of risk avoided and months of engineering time saved over the life of the platform.” – Kon Melamud CTO

SQL Server 2025 strengthens encryption for data in transit. Microsoft has implemented the highest standards to reduce the risk of your data being compromised in-flight, using not only TDS 8 (previously available in SQL Server 2022) but also TLS 1.3. TLS 1.3 is now supported across SQL Agent, sqlcmd, bcp, replication, log shipping, availability group endpoints, and PolyBase with SQL Server 2025.

Cost Savings for User and Developer Experience

SQL Server 2025 includes Copilot integration in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), which has productivity implications for development teams and increases developer efficiency.

SQL Server 2025 enables semantic/AI-powered similarity search directly in the database using a new VECTOR data type and the VECTOR_DISTANCE function. Note: Advanced vector indexing (DiskANN) is currently in public preview, while exact KNN search is currently GA, so plan accordingly for large-scale production deployments.

While this in itself does not provide a no-code experience for non-technical users, it simplifies development, enabling your end users to have better search capabilities with semantic search while letting you ship smarter features without buying and running a separate vector database, keeping both CapEx and OpEx in check.  This can open the door for end users to use descriptive searches with SQL Server to filter and dig into your data in ways never before possible. You can leverage native T-SQL filters and semantic search together, giving you the best of both worlds. For example, imagine the benefits to your sales team when they can use semantic search natively within your CRM. They would be more efficient, leading to more deals won, which alone could justify upgrading your entire tech stack.

Finally, on the developer end, the addition of native JSON, while seemingly small, is a big step forward. This simplifies application development and reduces development complexity. That means your application will be built faster, more efficiently, and more reliably.  While XML remains fully supported, JSON has become the industry standard for modern APIs and web applications.

Data Replication is Simplified and Cost-Efficient

Fabric mirroring reduces the risk of replication errors and data pipeline inconsistencies by automating data loading, so you no longer need a custom-built solution to move your raw data from application databases to your data lake. Eliminating custom pipelines for ingesting your data can save tens of thousands of dollars annually in development and maintenance costs. Not only does this save you time and money, but did you also know that Fabric Mirroring storage is free up to a limit based on the fabric’s capacity? Also, the background Fabric Compute used to replicate your data into Fabric OneLake is free and does not consume capacity.

SQL Server 2025 includes an architectural improvement, the change feed, that simplifies your data replication. Previously, change data capture (CDC) was required, which could be a pain to troubleshoot and manage. Fabric Mirroring makes it easier to move your data from your business-critical application databases to your trusted data foundation (modern data warehouse). The first step, getting raw data reliably into your analytics layer, is where many initiatives fail because problems here snowball quickly.  Getting data into a place where it can be transformed and analyzed is paramount. You need this step to be quick, reliable, and consistent with the data changes in your application, without impacting the performance of your line-of-business applications.

Currently, Azure Arc is required to set up SQL Server 2025’s change feed feature to replicate data to Fabric in near real-time.  Later in this article, we will also explain why Azure Arc is worth using with your on-premises SQL Servers running SQL Server 2025.

Discontinued Features and Migration Planning

Older versions of SQL Server are approaching or have passed the end of support. SQL Server 2014 is already out of extended support (ended July 9th 2024). SQL Server 2016 support ends on July 14, 2026, which is less than six months away. If you’re still running SQL Server 2016 in production, this should be one of your most urgent planning items. If you need help with your SQL Server 2025 upgrade, reach out. We can help! SQL Server 2017’s extended support ends on October 12, 2027. 

I would hate to find out you had a data breach because an exploit was found in an old, unsupported version of SQL Server you were using in production.

As with every major release of SQL Server, some features are discontinued. Each one involves financial considerations that could affect your decision to use SQL Server 2025. Data Quality Services (DQS), Master Data Services (MDS), Synapse Link, Machine Learning Services, and SSRS (replaced by Power BI Report Server).

Here I want to share some of my personal thoughts and experiences with using these discontinued features.  

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is being replaced by Power BI Report Server (PBIRS)

Simply put: Power BI Report Server is basically “SSRS plus Power BI,” with a more modern portal that lets you run both paginated RDL reports and on-prem Power BI (.pbix) reports. Power BI Report Server still is an on-prem report server that uses the SSRS engine under the covers.

Synapse Link is replaced by Fabric Mirroring.

No need for Synapse Link when we can utilize the newly added change feed to replicate your application data to Fabric.

Machine Learning Services (Python and R) packages are being removed from SQL Server 2025

From a financial perspective, Machine Learning Services (Python and R) never made much sense to me, so I am not surprised it is being discontinued.  I don’t think it ever made financial sense to use your expensive SQL Server cores for running Python or R when you could have done so on a separate server.

Data Quality Services (DQS) and Master Data Services (MDS) are being removed

Microsoft is clearly shifting away from in-box, server-bound data quality/master data tooling towards cloud-first governance and MDM patterns. Both products were stagnant and niche in adoption. MDS has not seen meaningful feature investment in years, and it is no longer viable in the modern cloud stack. Microsoft’s strategic direction for data governance, catalog, and master data management is now centered on Azure Purview/Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Fabric, and partner MDM solutions rather than SQL Server-hosted services.

The Verdict

The financial case for upgrading to SQL Server 2025 is strong.

SQL Server 2025 is a major step forward in many ways. It’s more secure and reliable, and offers companies much greater flexibility through changes to the Express, Standard, and Developer editions.  

Whether you are new to SQL Server or want to upgrade your on-prem, hybrid, or cloud SQL Server databases, ProcureSQL can help. Schedule a free assessment to ensure you’re getting the most return on your investment in using SQL Server or Azure SQL Databases.

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SQL Server 2025 Standard Developer Edition

Posted on May 25, 2025 | Leave a comment

With the release candidate of SQL Server 2025, which came out last week, I want to discuss a valuable feature you won’t see in the Microsoft press release: SQL Server 2025 Developer Standard Edition.

Microsoft is finally addressing a long-standing headache for database professionals. They finally included a Developer Standard edition in SQL Server 2025, fixing the mismatch between development and production environments. The new Standard Developer edition allows teams to build, test, and validate their database solutions using a free, fully licensed copy of the Standard edition for the first time!

SQL Server 2025 Developer Standard Edition eliminates costly licensing for non-production use while ensuring feature parity with production.

Previously, organizations used the Developer edition, functionally equivalent to the Enterprise edition, for development and testing. If you also used the enterprise edition in production, this wasn’t a problem. Problems occur when you try to save money using developer edition (enterprise edition) features in dev or test, while using the standard edition in production. This mismatch often led to surprises during deployment, such as features that worked in development but failed in production due to missing or restricted capabilities in the Standard edition. Or worse, code that works and returns the same results, but has abnormal performance because enterprise edition features cause a change in the execution plans.

For example, Intelligent Query Processing batch mode for row store—a feature only available in Enterprise and Developer editions—could not be used in Standard edition environments, leading to cases where performance can be good in development and testing with the same data and transactional load footprint as production, but give you worse performance in production when utilizing standard edition.

In the past, we would have to use the Developer edition, which opened this window for utilizing enterprise features in dev and test. With SQL Server 2025, you can select the Standard Developer edition or Enterprise Developer edition during the installation, ensuring your development environment mirrors production as closely as possible. This is especially valuable for teams whose production workloads run on the Standard edition.

SQL Server 2025 gives you Standard Developer edition so you can develop and test only against the standard features.

With SQL Server performance, edition matters. Below is a chart showing that the majority of the performance-based features are Enterprise edition-only features. For two reasons, this article will focus on Online index rebuilds and batch mode for row store queries.

A breakdown of SQL Server 2025 performance features by edition so you can see which features are enterprise only. If you couldn't tell its most of them.

Error Example: Online Index Rebuilds

To illustrate the practical impact, consider the scenario where a developer tries to use the ALTER INDEX ... REBUILD WITH (ONLINE = ON) command. This command works flawlessly in a Developer (Enterprise) environment, allowing users to rebuild indexes without downtime. However, if the production environment is Standard, the same command will fail with an error, since online index rebuilds are not supported in the Standard edition.

While this is not too hard to catch in testing, you would be surprised how often it is missed.

Let’s look at one more example that doesn’t cause an error but changes the performance and execution plans between the standard and enterprise editions. Because the developer edition before SQL Server 2025 used enterprise features, you would benefit from batch mode for your row store queries without knowing it.

SQL 2025 Standard Developer Edition: Different Plan and Performance

We will look at an example with the SQL Server Standard Developer Edition and the SQL Server Enterprise Developer Edition. 

USE WideWorldImporters;
GO

SELECT 
    ol.OrderID,
    ol.StockItemID,
    ol.Description,
    ol.OrderLineID,
    o.Comments,
    o.CustomerID
FROM 
    Sales.OrderLines ol
INNER JOIN 
    Sales.Orders o ON ol.OrderID = o.OrderID
WHERE 
    ol.StockItemID = 168
GO

With the SQL Server Enterprise Developer Edition, we use an Adaptive Join to counteract filters with low and high numbers of rows.

With the SQL Server Standard Developer edition feature in SQL Server 2025, we see the same execution plan in dev, test, and production when we use the Standard edition for production. In this case, we don’t have batch mode, and you will see we use a hash join, which is not ideal for a small number of records for our filter.

The takeaway is that features can change functionality and how you get your data. This example would be more complex to catch in your development pipeline, most likely leading to a bad taste in your mouth about development and test being fast, but seeing negative performance when you release changes to production.

In summary, SQL Server 2025’s Standard Developer edition is a vital tool for any organization that values consistency and reliability across its database environments. Using the much more affordable standard edition of SQL Server empowers developers to test confidently, knowing that what works in development will also work in production—no more unpleasant feature surprises at go-live.

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Austin, Texas Best Microsoft Technical Training Oppertunity

Posted on April 22, 2025 | Leave a comment

If you’re looking to master SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric, attending the SQL Saturday event in Austin, Texas, is one of the smartest moves you can make for your career.

Note: Austin, Texas, is hosting their event on May 2nd and 3rd.

Here’s why:

Free, High-Quality Training

SQL Saturday events are renowned for offering a full day of technical sessions that are entirely free of charge (pay for lunch). Whether a beginner or an experienced professional, you’ll find sessions tailored to your skill level, led by Microsoft employees, industry experts, and Microsoft MVPs passionate about sharing their knowledge. This includes all-day hands-on workshops (usually a paid add-on) and deep dives into the latest features of SQL Server, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric, ensuring you stay current with the rapidly evolving Microsoft data platform.

Learn from The Experts

Austin Texas SQL Saturday session

Speakers at SQL Saturday events are practitioners who solve real business problems with these technologies daily. You’ll gain practical insights, best practices, and tips you can immediately apply to your job to add value instantly. You’ll see how other companies and consultants leverage SQL Server, Power BI, and Microsoft Fabric to drive their business success.

Networking Opportunities in Austin, Texas

Experts go to and share their knowledge at SQL Saturdays because of their desire to connect, share, and learn together. These connections lead to mentorship, job opportunities, and lasting professional relationships. SQL Saturdays are more than just technical content. It’s a community gathering. You’ll connect with fellow data professionals, speakers, and recruiters. The supportive, grassroots atmosphere makes it easy for newcomers to feel at home and get involved. You never know, your next boss might be sitting next to you in a session.

Career and Community Growth

Attending SQL Saturday is a proven way to invest in your professional development. My company, ProcureSQL, is a living example. We wouldn’t exist without the technical and professional development at SQL Saturdays. It is a key reason why we continue to invest time and money to help these events succeed.

You’ll sharpen your technical skills and gain exposure to leadership and volunteering opportunities that can accelerate your career. Plus, you’ll become part of a global network of data professionals passionate about learning and sharing.

John Sterrett teaching performance tuning
SQL Saturday training class

In short, if you want to learn SQL Server, Power BI, or Microsoft Fabric, SQL Saturday offers an unbeatable combination of free training, expert guidance, and community support. Don’t miss your chance to level up. Join us at SQL Saturday Austin on May 2nd and 3rd, 2025.

Join Us at SQL Saturday Austin

PS: If you cannot attend SQL Saturday in Austin and still would like help with your Microsoft Data Platform problems, I am happy to chat one-on-one.

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Posted in Professional Development, SQLServerPedia Syndication, syndication

Weekly Content – Nov 4 2024

Posted on November 6, 2024 | Leave a comment

The following is content I created, links, videos, and other things I found interesting and wanted to share this week.

My Content

Microsoft Fabric Mirroring is Change the Game for Data Analytics – In this quick write-up, you will learn about a no-code, near real-time solution to get your data from your applications into your data lake.

Cloud / Data / Programming

Tech Links

Non-Tech

Videos

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Azure Managed Instance Changing DNS prefix

Posted on September 20, 2022 | 1 comment

Azure Managed Instances are provisioned by default with a yourname.uniqueid.databases.windows.net DNS fully qualified domain name (FQDN). Even on your private virtual network you will still have to use this FQDN.

If you want your Azure Managed Instance to connect with your DNS prefix like yourname.domain.com this blog post is for you.

Azure Managed Instance Virtual Network

Your first step is to make sure you are either using Azure DNS service or providing one on your own.

In my example we have hybrid setup with Active Directory and DNS Servers in both our virtual network and also on-premises so we will be utilizing an VM in the virtual network to provide DNS.

Azure Virtual Network DNS configuration for your Azure Managed Instance network.
Azure Virtual Network DNS Servers

DNS CNAME Alias Configuration

To allow private users to connect utilizing your DNS Zone you need to create a CName alias in DNS. The alias needs to have the same name as your managed instance. In this example, I created a Azure Managed Instance named “procuresql01mi”. Its FQDN is procuresql01mi.b6d698c00851.database.windows.net. The Domain name of my lab is PASS2020.com. I will configure a CName alias so all requests to procuresql01mi.pass2020.com internally will be routed to procuresql01mi.b6d698c00851.database.windows.net.

DNS CName Alias for changing DNS Zone when connecting to a Azure Managed Instance
DNS CName Alias for Azure Managed Instance

Azure Managed Instance DNS Zone Change Wrap Up

Now all you have to do is connect with the new DNS name used with the alias and you are good to go! If you use Azure AD to connect make sure enable “Trust Server Certificate” on your connection.

rust server certificate for Azure Managed Instance DNS CName Alias
Trust server certificate for Azure Managed Instance DNS CName Alias

Here you can see both connections via SSMS.

Azure managed instance with your DNS domain
Azure Managed Instance with your DNS domain.

If you have any problems and want some help contact us. Also, if you like these tips subscribe to our newsletter.

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Posted in Azure, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Join us for FryeDay!

Posted on November 7, 2018 | 1 comment

Once again it is PASS Summit week in Seattle. This is the biggest event in the world for SQL Server and Microsoft Data Professionals to gather to connect,

Frye First Time Speaker

Frye First Time Speaker

share and learn.

I will never forget being anxious and scared the first time I gave a presentation at PASS in front of hundreds of people.  Therefore, one of my favorite traditions during PASS Summit is to find a first-time speaker at PASS and try to make them at ease by having their friends and peers wear something special during their first presentation.

This year, I couldn’t think of a better person than Jeremy Frye. I have known Jeremy for years. I have been blessed to work with him at RDX. While everyone in the community knows him as the speaker who wears a Pittsburgh Pirates hat at SQL Saturday’s he is an inspiration to me. He is proof that good guys can be successful in this community. He is one of the most humble, kind and helpful people I know.  I have been

Dress like Frye Day!

Dress like Frye Day!

blessed to see him share his knowledge for years and am excited for everyone to do so this week as well. Therefore, to help Jeremy for his first session we will be giving out Pittsburgh Pirates hats to support Jeremy. If you can make Jeremy’s session on “Speed Up Your SSAS Data Refresh with Dynamic Partition Processing” at 11:00 am in room 604 on Friday (I like to call it FryeDay) come on by the RDX booth and ask for a Pirates hat. When you see Jeremy around this week tell him you got this and you cannot wait for his session!

 

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Posted in Professional Development, SQLServerPedia Syndication

Best Hidden Feature in SQL Server 2019

Posted on September 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

With Microsoft’s Ignite conference this week a lot of new features are being advertised all over the internet.  Most likely if you are following along you have heard of Big Data Clusters, Spark, Performance Tuning, and security features.  I am really excited about this new feature and hope you are as excited about it too.

 

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SQL Server Automatic Tuning in the Real-World

Posted on September 9, 2018 | 1 comment

In SQL Server 2016 we saw Query Store.  Query Store was a game changer to help database administrators identify troublesome queries. Query Store helps DBAs make those queries run faster.  Microsoft’s marketing team even jumped on to help coin the phrase, “SQL Server It Just Runs Faster.” With SQL Server 2017, this started to get even better with automatic tuning. Don’t worry database administrators.  Automatic Tuning will just enhance your career and not replace it.

SQL Server 2017 Automatic Tuning looks for queries where execution plans change and performance regresses. This feature depends on Query Store being enabled. Note, even if you don’t turn on Automatic Tuning you still get the benefits of having access to the data. That is right. Automatic Tuning would tell you what it would do if it was enabled.  Think of this as free performance tuning training.  Go look at the DMVs and try to understand why the optimizer would want to lock in an execution plan. We will actually go through a real-world example:

Automatic Tuning with SQL Server 2017

First, let’s take a quick look at the output of the data. You can find the query and results we will focus on below.

SELECT reason, score,
      script = JSON_VALUE(details, '$.implementationDetails.script'),
      planForceDetails.*,
      estimated_gain = (regressedPlanExecutionCount+recommendedPlanExecutionCount)
                  *(regressedPlanCpuTimeAverage-recommendedPlanCpuTimeAverage)/1000000,
      error_prone = IIF(regressedPlanErrorCount>recommendedPlanErrorCount, 'YES','NO')
--INTO DBA.Compare.Tunning_Recommendations
FROM sys.dm_db_tuning_recommendations
  CROSS APPLY OPENJSON (Details, '$.planForceDetails')
    WITH (  [query_id] int '$.queryId',
            [current plan_id] int '$.regressedPlanId',
            [recommended plan_id] int '$.recommendedPlanId',

            regressedPlanErrorCount int,
            recommendedPlanErrorCount int,

            regressedPlanExecutionCount int,
            regressedPlanCpuTimeAverage float,
            recommendedPlanExecutionCount int,
            recommendedPlanCpuTimeAverage float

          ) as planForceDetails;

I will break the results down into two photos to make them fit well in this blog post.

Free Tuning Recommendations with Automatic Tuning in SQL Server 2017

Free Tuning Recommendations with SQL Server 2017 (1/2)

Automatic Tuning Results in SQL Server 2017

Free Tuning Recommendations with SQL Server 2017 (2/2)

Now we know in the query store query_id 2271 has CPU time changing from 7,235ms to 26ms. That’s a big difference. Let’s take that query and look at its findings by using the tracked query report inside SSMS.

Query Store find history of a query

Find my Changed Query. Did the plans change?

Here we can see the major difference between the two execution plans. One is averaging over 14 seconds in duration while the other is under a second.

Reviewing Query performance in Query Store

Query Store showing the performance difference between the two plans

Now we can select both plans on the screen above and look at the execution plans side by side inside of SSMS. When doing so, we see the common example of the optimizer determining if it is better to scan an index vs a seek with a key lookup.

Side by Side Execution Plan Review in SSMS.

Using SSMS to compare auto tuning recommended query.

To complete the example I want to point out that automatic tuning would lock in the index seek plan (Plan 2392). In SQL Server 2016 you can do this as well manually inside Query Store. With SQL Server 2017 it can be done automatically for you with Automatic Tuning. If you have ever woken up to slow performance due to an execution plan changing and performance going through the drain this might be a life saver.

If you would like to learn about performance tuning changes in SQL Server 2016 and 2017 sign up for our newsletter or catch me talking about these features at SQL Saturday Denver and SQL Saturday Pittsburgh this month.  If you need any help with tuning or upgrading contact us. We would love to chat with you!

 

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Why We’re Organizing SQL Saturday in Wheeling, WV on April 28th

Posted on March 29, 2018 | Leave a comment

Some of my friends know I am a huge fan of the song “Havana” by Camila Cabello. They also know I like to remix songs and if I was to remix the song I would just change the word “Havana” to “Wheeling, WV” because half of my heart is in the Ohio Valley.

Why?

Wheeling is where I grew up as an adult and to this day it is one of the special happy places I like to visit. On April 28th Wheeling will host their the third SQL Saturday. Anyone can attend for FREE! l look forward to sharing my favorite city with the SQL Community and my SQL Family.

Free SQL Server Training in Wheeling, WV

Free SQL Server Training on April 29th in Wheeling, WV

Procure SQL will be teaming up with the Wheeling Chapter of AITP (only IT group in Ohio Valley) to bring some expert SQL Server training from MVPs, MCTs, and community experts to the Ohio Valley. I hope Data Platform professionals in nearby cities like Columbus, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Cleveland and Washington DC join is un the fun as well.

Things to Do?

Check out this quick five-minute video to find out some of the great things you can do in Wheeling, WV and why I fell in love with Wheeling!

Food

Colemans Fish Market – It is #1 on TripAdvisor for a reason. Best-fried fish sandwiches.
Ye Old Alpha – The Bridgeport brownie is legendary good.
DeCarlos Pizza – Wheeling’s special version of Pizza. If you get it make sure to eat it quick. Locals typically will eat it on the hood of their cars.
Undos – My personal favorite Italian food restaurant.

Places to See:

Good Mansion Wine – If you like wine, the selection here is fantastic. They will also have an open wine tasting event April 27th at 6 pm. If you are looking for something fun to do the night before the event I would recommend this.
Suspension Bridge – If you like history. You have to check out one of the oldest suspension bridges in the USA. You can still walk and drive across it.
Wheeling Artisan Center – Great small tour of the history of Wheeling, WV.
Center Market – Historic part of town with a lot of shops and places to eat. Its an easy walk from the SQL Saturday venue.
Oglebay Resort – Depending on the weather the driving range or ski lift will be open. Seriously, a great five-star resort with epic holiday events including Christmas lights, ogalbayfest, and 4th of July.
Wheeling Island Casino – If you like to play cards and win money its a great location. Used to do it a lot on lunch breaks.

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SQL Saturday Chicago

Posted on March 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Last weekend I had a blast speaking at the SQL Saturday in Chicago. It was awesome to share my knowledge and also catch up with some good friends.  My talk was on Automating the Pain Away with Query Store and Automated Tuning.  I hope this session helped people leverage Query Store and Automated Tuning to resolve their parameter sniffing problems.

John Sterrett Teaching Performance Tuning

John Sterrett teaching Performance Tuning at SQL Saturday Chicago

John Sterrett teaching performance tuning

SQL Saturday Chicago training class

 

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