Watch me comment on all of the features in this week’s video.
With the release of SQL Server 2019 imminent, I thought it’d be fun to rank which features I am most looking forward to in the new release.
(Also, I needed a lighter blogging week since I’m busy finishing preparing for my two sessions at PASS Summit next week – hope to see you there!).
I decided to rank these features on two axes: Excitement and Priority
Excitement is easy to describe: how excited I am about using these features. In my case, excitement directly correlates with performance and developer usability improvements. That doesn’t mean “Low Excitement” features aren’t beneficial; on the contrary, many are great, they just don’t top my list (it wouldn’t be fun to have a quadrant with everything in the top right).
Priority is how quickly I’ll work on implementing or tuning these features. The truth is that some of these features will work automatically once a SQL Server instance is upgraded, while some will require extra work (ie. query rewriting, hardware config). Once again, “Low Priority” features aren’t bad, they just won’t be the features that I focus on first.
Finally, these rankings are based on Microsoft’s descriptions of these features and what little tinkering I’ve done with pre-releases of SQL Server 2019. As far as I know, this chart will totally change once I start using these features regularly in production environments.
And here are my rankings in list form in case that’s more your style:
High Excitement, High Priority
- Scalar function inlining
- Memory grant feedback
- sys.dm_exec_query_plan_stats
- Accelerated Database Recovery
- Table Variable deferred compilation
High Excitement, Low Priority
- Big Data Clusters
- Polybase all the things
- Enhancements to running on Windows, Linux, and containers
Low Excitement, High Priority
- Batch mode on rowstore indexes
- Index encrypted columns
- Optimize for sequential key
- Useful truncation error messages
Low Excitement, Low Priority
- New graph functions
- Java language extension
What are you most excited for in 2019? What features did I miss? Disagree with where something should be ranked? Let me know in the comments below.