The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mala Mahadevan
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
Conference Season Begins
Our first topic covered several upcoming conferences. We have SQLcon in Atlanta, with multiple SQL Saturdays and Days of Data following it. The southeastern US will have several major events between now and the end of May, with Raleigh Day of Data 2026 taking place on May 23rd in Durham. The call for speakers is still open for another week or so, but get your sessions in!
State of the Database Landscape
Our major topic this episode was Redgate’s 2026 State of the Database Landscape. We went through a PDF of the report, though admittedly, I got side-tracked multiple times on graphics I hate and a detailed discussion of how brown, white, and black are not actually colors.
As far as the actual report goes, I did mention some spots that seemed surprising to me, and do recommend picking up a copy of the report, even if using circle sizes to describe relative percentages is a terrible idea.
SQL Server 2025 Known Issues
We spent a brief amount of time talking about current issues in SQL Server 2025, including one around slow behavior when bringing online a large number of databases, regardless of whether you have availability groups set up. We also took a bit of a diversion around this to discuss trace flags, trace flag scopes, full-text search, and how much I dislike James Joyce.
Updates against Inline Table-Valued Functions
Our final topic was a blog post from Greg Low. Mala was shocked that SQL Server allows you to update an underlying table using an UPDATE statement on an inline table-valued function. I noted that you can do the same thing against views when there is no ambiguity in the view definition, and we speculated as to why you might do this. My guess is that it was to entice some Oracle developers and DBAs over to SQL Server, as the Oracle perspective for a very long time was to create a set of views separate from the base tables and only grant user access to those views rather than the underlying tables. The why behind this behavior is speculation, but I will say that regardless, I don’t recommend doing this because it’s pretty confusing behavior.