The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
Microsoft Build Announcements
The first major topic was a quick review of Microsoft Build announcements with respect to the data platform. We started off with James Serra’s blog post on the topic and then spent some time in the Microsoft Build Book of News. The nicest thing we said is that, well, hey, one of the topics wasn’t around Copilot or Fabric.
SQL Server Management Studio 21 Now Available
Mike wanted to let us know that SQL Server Management Studio 21 is now available. Mike talked a little bit about some functionality changes and we spent a bit of time discussing SSMS switching over to the 64-bit Visual Studio shell and how Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are very different beasts.
Backup Compression in SQL Server 2025
After that, I covered a pair of blog posts on the new ZSTD compression format for backups in SQL Server 2025. Anthony Nocentino and Andy Yun had blog posts on the topic that we covered. I still want to caution against taking their numbers as the sum total of experience here, as there are a lot of factors that go into database compression ratios and time to process. But it’s great that these gentlemen have given us some data points that we can use as a starting point.
Describing Result Sets
Finally, we made Mike’s week by teaching him about the sp_describe_first_result_set stored procedure and the related sys.dm_describe_first_result_set() function. Mike needed a way to get column names and data types from an arbitrary T-SQL query, and this has been in the product since SQL Server 2012, so there’s (almost) no version concerns.