>> Introducing SQL Server 2022.
Learn all about it this week on Data Exposed.
[MUSIC]
>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman
and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today, I'm joined by Bob Ward,
our resident SQL Server expert, guru and colleague.
Bob, thanks so much for joining us on the show today.
>> Anna, I don't know if I'll live up to those expectations,
but I'm so excited to be back on your show again.
>> Yeah, always excited and a pleasure to have you on the show.
Today, we're going to be talking about something really exciting,
something I've been hearing a little bit about,
some announcement about the next version of SQL Server.
Can you tell me, are the rumors true?
Can you tell us a little bit about what this is?
>> Yes. A lot of people have been asking me for a while now.
When is the next version of SQL Server
or is SQL Server still going to exist?
The rumors are false.
SQL Server still exists.
In fact, we have just recently announced
the next version of SQL Server called SQL Server 2022.
>> Awesome. Cool. This is very exciting.
For the next couple of minutes,
I'd love to get your take on some of the big-ticket items
that are in SQL Server 2022
and any other exciting info you think you should share with us.
I should warn our viewers that
this is a new series that we're doing.
You can follow along and follow that mini-series
to get more episodes about SQL Server 2022.
>> Anna, thanks again for the opportunity
to be talking about this.
I'm so excited as you can tell about releasing SQL Server
and giving all that information to our community.
I'd be remiss, though, if I didn't start by making sure
our audience understands where we've been.
When I actually worked and presented on SQL Server 2019,
I would talk about things like Query Store and people were like,
"What is that," because I'm an older version of SQL Server.
Look at the foundation of what we've built,
and this is just the next step,
whether it be Query Store or PolyBase or Linux and containers
or Intelligent Query Processing or Accelerated Database Recovery.
We're just taking that incredible foundation
and in SQL Server 2022 building on it.
If you look at a big picture of what this release is about,
I think of these five areas,
but that's not all because
we're going to talk about a lot of it today.
It starts on the left about
connecting to Azure for disaster recovery,
about using Managed Instance to make it very easy
now to link your SQL Server
and use Managed Instance as a disaster recovery site.
Pretty cool stuff because today,
that can be a little difficult to set up
even if you're using something like Azure Virtual Machine
or you may be interested in analytics,
but you don't want to do ETL anymore.
You'd like to do your analytics in Synapse,
but make it very easy to take changes from your SQL Server,
feed them in a Synapse and use
the power of all that technology that you get,
whether it be SQL pools or
Spark pools or Power BI or whatever it may be.
You just don't want to have to set up ETL jobs anymore and manage
all of that and you want your data more near real-time.
You may have seen announcements about Azure Purview,
a new governance system,
a new discovery system,
and we're going to tightly integrate with that.
Look at these three areas right here.
All of a sudden now,
I think of SQL Server as being Azure enabled.
Not that I have to keep my SQL Server on Azure,
I still want to keep my SQL Server on-premises.
Many customers want to do that,
but I would like to leverage the power of the Cloud,
whether it's to help with disaster recovery,
put analytics up into Cloud,
take my changes up there
or to use Purview to look at things in my data state
or even control access to SQL Server.
Three big areas that we're besting in
and you'll see more about
as we continue to talk about SQL Server 2022.
Anna, the meat and potatoes of SQL Server
is security performance and availability,
not necessarily in that order.
We continue to show and demonstrated
we are the least vulnerable database on the market,
but we're doing innovative things like SQL Server ledger,
bringing blockchain technologies down to SQL Server.
Some people have seen the preview of that in Azure SQL already.
Then, we've always been this industry-leading performance,
not just on how fast we are but price performance,
we continue to do that but look at these features here,
a built-in query intelligence.
We want to continue down that [inaudible] .
I can't wait to show you more about what that is later today
and then multi-write replication,
being able to do changes to the same database across
two different servers, leveraging replication technologies.
You look at the bottom down here.
One thing that people I don't think truly realize,
you and I have talked about it before,
is this idea of SQL Edge to Cloud.
The fact that SQL Server shows up everywhere you need it,
but it's consistent in its engine, its language,
and its tools and you think about Edge,
Azure Arc and Azure SQL,
SQL Server 2022 just fits within this paradigm.
Then, we have always demonstrated
about cost and our cost versus our competition.
SQL Server 2022 will continue to do that.
Let's unpack a few more things in the release
to get people excited about what we're doing.
I talked about built-in query intelligence.
Query Store has been a great technology we've had
for a while but guess what?
We feel so comfortable and confident of using Query Store over
these years with SQL Server customers
and it being in the Cloud where millions of databases,
we're going to turn it on by default
for new databases in SQL Server 2022.
A very common request from our customers,
"Can I enable the Query Store on
a read replica for availability groups?"
There are going to be silent applause
in the background as people are watching this.
Yes, we're going to turn that on in SQL Server 2022.
Here's what's interesting.
We're going to take some new
intelligent query processing scenarios,
I call it Next Gen,
because we invested in these scenarios
in previous versions of SQL Server,
and in some cases, as you see on the screen right here,
we're going to combine the technologies.
We're going to use Query Store as our persistence mechanism
to take things like feedback to improve cardinality estimation
for new CE models
or Max Degree of Parallelism scenarios
to improve those type of queries as well
but check out the top one, Anna.
Have you ever heard of something called parameter sensitive plans?
Boy, that is something that people
have struggled with for years,
and I've been here 28 years at Microsoft.
I can't believe I'm actually saying that, but it's true.
People have struggled with this problem
for as long as I've been here.
The problem is that I've got the same stored procedure.
I've got different parameter values that lead in a plan
that's not optimal for both of them.
Either one of them need different plans,
but I can link cache one.
Guess what we're going to do now?
We're actually going to cache
two of them or multiple of them.
You're going to be able to have the same stored procedure
with different parameter values,
and we're going to automatically solve
what a lot of people call parameter-sniffing problems.
I am so excited.
You're going to see some demonstrations of this one
coming up of things that we've done in this space.
I'm really excited to see about this technology.
Keep in mind this is about us making you faster
and reducing the need for query tuning with zero code changes.
We talked about the meat and potatoes of SQL Server.
As Conor Cunningham likes to say,
there's a pile of things
that we're doing in these spaces: security.
We talked about ledger.
We're going to continue hints,
things like always encrypted.
We're going to continue down the path of core security features,
and these are all based on customer feedback from us,
whether it's from the CSS Team
or the field or direct customer feedback.
We're going to make enhancements in these areas.
When it comes to scalability,
we're going to continue and enhance here.
Look at that middle one, system page concurrency.
We're going to improve the story about TempDB.
We've done it in the past in previous releases.
We're going to continue down this path of trying
to make latch problems go away for TempDB.
Yeah, excitement from the audience.
I don't want to deal with TempDB latching anymore.
Then finally, in the areas of availability,
a whole bunch of stuff we're doing,
including what I mentioned before,
which is multi-write replication
with a automatic last writer wins detection technology.
But look at this one, redesigned snapshot backups.
What the heck is that?
Well, you're going to be able to now use T-SQL
to interface with the engine
to do your own types of snapshot backups versus
having to rely on something called volume snapshot for Windows.
This allows cross-platform snapshots like on Linux platform.
There's just a bunch of stuff and Anna,
as we move along in this release,
you're going to learn about all these types of features.
Now, one of the things we did in previous release of
SQL Server is something called PolyBase.
We believe in this idea that you can get access to
data in different sources without moving the data.
We'd like to continue to invest in this space and
if you look at this graphic right here,
we'd like to pivot and
maybe use new technologies to make this happen.
We like to use REST API calls within SQL Server.
I call this PolyBase vNext.
That's not an official name,
that's my name, but here's the power.
We're still going to use the concept of external tables or
OPENROWSET to access file formats natively like Parquet, JSON,
CSV or even Delta table lake formats,
and we're going to connect to
popular connectors like S3
or Azure Data Lake or Azure Blob Storage.
Again, think of that unstructured or semi-structured data
you have in different locations.
Don't ETL that into SQL Server.
Use our PolyBase technology with T-SQL to access that data and,
of course, join that to other data you have in SQL Server.
Then, we've also learned that
some customers are starting to store their data and
different types of files in what we call object
storage based on a protocol called S3.
We are going to do something pretty innovative.
We're going to allow you to take a SQL Server database backup
and use native T-SQL to back up.
Today, you can do a URL to Azure Blob Storage.
Now, you can back up to an S3-compatible
storage device or location.
Look at these popular partners we have listed right here,
and that list is going to grow.
Take a native T-SQL database backup and
back it up there or restore it back into SQL Server.
Then finally, I think about the T-SQL language.
What you saw in that previous screen was us taking
the T-SQL language and
extending it to these other types of capabilities.
We think T-SQL is a very powerful language.
We know customers don't want to learn
new skills and new languages.
Why can't you just extend T-SQL?
We're going to continue to do that.
We're going to continue to make the JSON experience better.
We're going to continue to expand
the T-SQL surface area to make sure we are up to date with
all anti-compatibilities of standards and with user feedback to us
on common system functions that
people want and make better with T-SQL.
Then, we're going to take things like
time series scenarios that we've done in Azure SQL Edge,
and we're going to bring that into the SQL Server engine as well.
I think of SQL Server 2022 as embracing T-SQL as a language that
people know and love and extending it for
new scenarios for developers.
Well, it's a lot in a quick fashion, Anna,
but you can see already the power of what
we're bringing to the next release of SQL Server.
>> Yeah, definitely. I don't even know if I can keep track of
all the changes and updates that are
exciting and coming with SQL Server 2022.
I'm especially excited about PolyBase.
I know everyone's been really excited about PolyBase,
so to see that there is a Next Gen,
we're making it even better,
is pretty cool along with some of
the security capabilities, the performance capabilities.
PSPs can be really big.
We'll be looking forward to that demo.
Bob like myself and people watching
this video now are all excited, jazzed up.
How do we get started with SQL Server 2022?
How do I get the bits?
>> Well, first of all, just to make sure we're clear,
you mentioned already you're partnering
with us to do a series on this.
Get ready for more episodes in Data Exposed
to dive further into everything.
I just flew over and gave you an amazing overview for,
but I know you want to get started.
Use this link at the top to just get started
and learn more about the release for SQL 2022.
Again, like any new release of SQL Server,
we're starting out in a preview fashion.
What you need to do to get signed up to start
trying this out is use this link right here.
Sign up for Early Adopter Program
and you can start testing
and working with us directly to look at the features of SQL 2022.
Then, Anna, I love Microsoft Mechanics.
What a cool way to demonstrate and go deeper in technologies.
You can go to this link right here to see me
and a Microsoft Mechanics video with Jeremy Chapman
diving deeper into some of the things
and doing some really cool demos of stuff we talked about today.
>> Awesome. Well, Bob, this has been so great.
Thank you so much for coming on the show
and introducing SQL Server 2022.
For our viewers, we're going to put a link in the description
to all of those links that Bob just mentioned,
as well as a link to this playlist so you can follow along
and see the upcoming episodes as we dive into
these different capabilities for SQL Server 2022.
Bob, thanks again so much for joining us.
For our viewers, thanks for joining us.
If you like this video, go ahead and give it a like,
subscribe to our channel,
and we hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
[MUSIC]