The 2022 Preview

This was a strange week for me. Traveling in Brussels with my wife and prepping for a few presentations. Then Techorama, an even more 2019-era conference in Belgium where I spoke around a few customer calls sprinkled in during the week. I have a new SQL Saturday I was trying to get scheduled, while coordinating with my doctor for a surgery Friday, and keeping up with some travel plans for the next month.

In the middle of all that, Microsoft Build took place this week. Needless to say I didn't see any presentations from the event, but I did see quite a few blog posts and entries this week from various MVPs and others. I took a few minutes to watch Data Exposed, and I read a few posts. I liked the thoughts from Paul Andrew on the Intelligent Data Platform. He is more of a BI person, and I think a lot of the evolution of the platform is moving to add more BI and get more intelligence from the database for customers.

I've been playing with the CTP lightly for a few months. Many of the MVPs have as well, and while most things work the same, there are some new things that might be useful in your workload. You can get the CTP of SQL Server 2022 at https://aka.ms/getsqlserver2022, and see what's changed, test your current apps, and in general get excited about the future of SQL Server.

If you want some ideas and demos to follow around, check out Bob Ward's demos at https://aka.ms/bobsqldemos. He's put his various scripts and notebooks for the platform, where you can reproduce and examine some of the features. Bob has been showing off some of these things at various conferences for awhile, and now you can get his code to do some testing. Aaron Bertrand also has a number of posts on SQL 2022.

As always, if you find issues, send in feedback. MS does read this stuff, and while they don't always agree with you or I, they do consider things. The more you put the reason you want a change in business terms, the better off things are. Rather than saying "an empty CATCH clause hides an error", you might say that "the empty catch clause was unexpected and caused clients to resubmit a form 22 times before customer service could track down a bug." Be specific and show a relation to a tangible business problem for all your errors.

In many ways SQL Server is a very mature product for me. The core engine meets most of the needs I have for SQL Server Central as well as those of many of my customers. However, there are lots of organizations that might benefit from one or more of these features. Whether on premises or in the cloud, we want the platform to grow and improve.

Plus, it can be exciting to reproduce one of Bob's demos and learn something. As we move towards a new version of SQL Server, take a little time to get excited about technology and see what changes are coming in SQL Server and the Data Platform.

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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