Short version (Edit 2025-11-26: If you still want to use containers, Anthony Nocentino has the answer for you here: https://www.nocentino.com/posts/2025-11-26-sql-server-2025-docker-desktop-avx-issue/) You want to get this running as fast as possible. Do these four steps, and…
The honeymoon is over, and macOS 26 Tahoe broke the Rosetta 2 emulation layer with SQL Server 2025 RC 1 running in a Docker container. I know it was Tahoe, because it worked the day…
A discussion on LinkedIn led to this hypothetical “real world” question: Problem statement: I have a SQL Server 2000 database backup that I need to restore to a supported version of SQL Server (preferably SQL…
It’s me again with my apparently semi-annual blog post. This time we’re going to talk about which version of SQL Server you should be on, now that we’re at the end of 2023. Which version…
Edited on 12 January 2023: You can run a SQL Server Docker container on Apple M1 and M2 Silicon Last month I wrote a blog post suggesting that it was not possible to get SQL Server…
Edited on 12 January 2023: You can run a SQL Server Docker container on Apple M1 and M2 Silicon Prior to 2017, the only way to get SQL Server running on a Mac was through a…
My co-authors and I recently wrapped up the book SQL Server 2019 Administration Inside Out, which should be hitting the shelves in the next week or two. At the end of Chapter 1 I have…
An exciting new feature in SQL Server 2019 is Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR). Resulting from a combination of magic beans and smart software developers (I might be wrong about the beans), there is a good…
In 2016 I created the Max Server Memory Matrix as a guide for configuring the maximum amount of memory that should be assigned to SQL Server, using an algorithm developed by Jonathan Kehayias. SQL Server 2019…
SQL Server 2019 is still in preview as I write this, but I wanted to point out a new feature that Microsoft has added to SQL Server Setup, on the Windows version. On the Database…
Next month, Microsoft is ending five years of extended support on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2. This follows five years of mainstream support before that. You really should be upgrading to SQL…
There was an interesting conversation on Twitter recently, between Grant Fritchey (blog | twitter), Kenneth Fisher (blog | twitter), Anthony E. Nocentino (blog | twitter), Vicky Harp (twitter), and me about containers and SQL Server.…
In October 2018, Microsoft announced a change to the source of their Docker containers. You should be using the new Microsoft Container Registry (MCR) as the source for official Docker container images for Microsoft products.…
(This post was updated on 1 August 2022.) A few months ago I suggested that the following settings should be the default for most SQL Server instances: Set cost threshold for parallelism to 50 Disable…
A short post this week. On a mailing list recently, someone noticed that a .NET application writing to SQL Server did not have the expected behaviour with UTF-8 collation and data types. To refresh our…