Last week marked my second trip to Pass Summit. To start my week of training off, I went to the SQL Server 2019 Workshop put on by the Microsoft SQL Server team. This was a Lab filled day, that showed you some of the great new features that the SQL team had been working on over the past year. There are a ton of new features that I could cover, but I want to keep this post to the two that I want to implement first.
- Data Virtualization – Utilizing the Polybase engine, we can create external tables on our new SQL Server 2019 instance. This allows us to query data from external sources without the need for an ETL solution or a linked server. Some considerations are needed before implementing this solution, as the data will still reside on the source system as well as the workload to process the query. To learn more, you can go to the Microsoft Docs link here.
- Accelerated Database Recovery – This is a feature that we saw at the KeyNote for Pass Summit 2018. This feature was first introduced in Azure last year and opened up additional safety nets that we didn’t have before. With the release of SQL Server 2019, this feature is now available for us still running on-premises or Infrastructure as a Service offering of SQL Server. With some of our BI processes, large transactions are a common occurrence. One of the fears we have, especially during our busy season, is needing to kill zombie processes and risk a large rollback. With ADR and a simple opt-in configuration change, we can have near-instantaneous rollbacks on sessions when they are killed. To learn more, you can go to the Microsoft Docs link here.
Again, these are just two of the many new features outlined at the SQL Server 2019 Workshop. If you’d like to see what else was discussed, Bob Ward and the team have worked up a killer GitHub Repo full of the Labs that we covered at the event.
Categories: Pass Summit 2019
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