SQL Server

SQL Server 2025 is an upcoming release focused on AI, analytics, and modern database development, backed by innovations in mission-critical engine features for security, performance, and high availability.

Let’s dive into what this means for your AI and data-driven applications. We’ll walk through some of the new features announced by Azure Data Principal Architect Bob Ward in his post Announcing SQL Server 2025, and I’ll give some thoughts on these innovations and where they will fit in the enterprise.

In this post, the third in our series on using T-SQL Snapshot Backup, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and then perform point-in-time database restores using that snapshot backup as the base, but this time using an Azure Virtual Machine. We will explore how to manage Azure storage-level operations, such as taking snapshots, cloning snapshots, and executing an instantaneous point-in-time database restore from the snapshot with minimal impact on your infrastructure. Additionally, I will demonstrate a PowerShell script that utilizes dbatools and Azure Az modules to automate the process.

In this post, the second in our series, I will guide you through using the new T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to take a snapshot backup and perform point-in-time database restores using a snapshot backup as the base of the restore. We will explore how to manage storage-level operations, such as cloning snapshots and executing an instantaneous point-in-time restore of a database from the snapshot with minimal impact on your infrastructure. Additionally, I will demonstrate a PowerShell script that utilizes dbatools and the PureStoragePowerShellSDK2 modules to automate the process.

Traditional SQL Server backups can struggle with large databases, resulting in longer backup times and resource contention. T-SQL Snapshot Backup, a new feature in SQL Server 2022, addresses these challenges by allowing storage-based snapshots to be coordinated through T-SQL. This feature delivers faster, more efficient backups, especially for large-scale environments with the most aggressive of recovery objectives.

Anatomy of a Full Backup

Before we start learning about T-SQL Snapshot backup, let’s establish what a backup in SQL Server is. When a backup is initiated in SQL Server, several things occur. Follow along in Figure 1 below; here, you see a database with database files on Disk A and a transaction log file on Disk B.

SQL Server 2022 introduces a new feature to enable application-consistent snapshot backups. TSQL Snapshot Backups enable the SQL Server to control the database quiesce without external tools. Using TSQL Snapshot backups enables instantaneous restores, independent of the size of data, for a database, group, or server backups, including point-in-time recovery.

When you use this feature, it freezes I/O. You’ll see a record like this in your error log when you execute the command ALTER DATABASE TestDB1 SET SUSPEND_FOR_SNAPSHOT_BACKUP = ON. This blog post will show you that the I/O freeze is just for write operations. You can continue to read from the database during this frozen state.

In this blog post, I will show you how to build a hello world container-based web application in the go programming language. The reason I want to do this is because I need a very small container image to do some testing in Kubernetes. I’ll also highlight some of the pitfalls I ran into to hopefully have you some time in your learnings.

Let’s build and test it locally first

Before you build a container-based application, you need an application. So let’s go ahead and build a simple hello world app in go, but running on our local system as a traditionally compiled program. I want to make sure my application works before I move onto the container build process. You’ll need to install the go programming language development tools. On a Mac, you can do that with brew install go. For other operating systems, check out the install page.

Introduction

Purity is the operating environment that runs Pure Storage products like FlashArray and Cloud Block Store. Starting in Purity 6.0, you can assign tags to objects. This post shows you how to perform some basic tagging operations for volumes.

What’s a Tag and Why Do I Care?

A tag is a key/value pair that can be attached to an object in FlashArray, like a volume or a snapshot. Using tags enables you to attach additional metadata to objects for classification, sorting, and searching. For example, you can assign a tag to a collection of volumes and then come along later and retrieve a listing of volumes that match a particular key or value. You can use tags to add application context to resources inside FlashArray. Specifically, in the examples in this blog post, I want to tag volumes with the names SQL Server Instances.

Last week I purchased a shiny new MacBook Air with an M2 processor. After I got all the standard stuff up and running, I set out to learn how to run SQL Server containers on this new hardware. This post shows you how to run SQL Server on Apple Silicon using colima.

Colima is a container runtime that runs a Linux VM on your Mac. This Linux VM runs using the Virtualization framework hypervisor native in MacOS. Your containers will run inside this virtual machine.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting at this year’s PASS Summit. PASS Data Community Summit 2022 is the year’s largest gathering of data platform professionals in the US. This year I have a pre-conference workshop, a regular session, and a Learning Path session. Let’s dive into each.

Pre-Conference Workshop: Become a Hybrid Architect

My good friend Ben E. Weissman and I will teach a pre-conference workshop called “Become a Hybrid Architect” in this workshop we will cover the foundations needed to design and build a hybrid cloud strategy for your organization.

Introduction

In this post, I will walk you through how to set up MinIO, so you can use it to work with SQL Server 2022’s s3 object integrations. Working with s3 and SQL Server requires a valid and trusted TLS certificate. This can be a pain for some users and environments. So I’m writing this post so you can get off the ground running with this new feature set in SQL Server 2022. The certificate we’re working with here is self-signed. You could get a real certificate for your environment, and that’s encouraged. But this walk-through intends to get you up and running fast so that you can test out SQL Server’s s3 object integrations. We’re using MinIO’s free GNU AGPL v3 edition and running it in a docker container for our s3 compatible object storage and SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.0, which is also running in a container.