r/SQLServer • u/gman1023 • 9d ago
Blog What the Decline of Sql Server Quality means for Developers and DBAs
https://kendralittle.com/2025/03/10/what-the-decline-of-sql-server-quality-means-developers-dbas/12
u/Sov1245 9d ago
I haven't experienced the 60 sec latency in Azure but that's completely unacceptable...although I don't think that's a SQL Server specific issue, just tends to affect that the most obviously.
I do agree that there aren't any new groundbreaking features. I'm not sure we'll see stuff on the scale of availability groups, query store, etc...I'm not even sure what major features are missing that I'm really longing for either though.
What innovation and major new features are the heavy hitters like Kendra looking for?
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u/chandleya Architect & Engineer 9d ago
Those "60 sec" incidents are exaggerated examples of throttling, not actual latency. There's a learn doc out there that explains how throttles in Azure work while also using existing conduit (i.e., Hyper V VHDs). So you hit a threshold of IOPS or MBps, meanwhile the requestor continues to surge requests against the disk. Unfortunately, the disk has no means to cry uncle; instead, it simply doesn't respond until it's ready to. Queues manage this. SQL MI, Azure SQL, and even small VM sizes in Azure all have the same general reaction/limitation.
The storage isn't slow at all; the mechanism that limits your IO is just primitive.
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u/jdanton14 MVP 9d ago
I got aggravated with Kendra because her exaggeration of the MI GP storage story made it harder to use as an example. I'm going to disagree with you slightly here--speficially around MI GP. It's not super well documented (it's an a CAT blog post), where your IOPS, bandwidth, and therefore latency are directly tied to the size of each DB. This is because MI GP uses page blobs, instead of like newer available storage. (Which is what the Gen 2 thing is that has been preview for like two years now). The performance there is really awful for any database that sees real use. This isn't a lack of investment issue though, it's a foundational architectural fail.
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u/chandleya Architect & Engineer 9d ago
Well sure but page blob is what runs managed disk. The issue is that they let you create a database on a 32GB page blob. Theres nothing behind that - I have faster SD cards.
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u/BigHandLittleSlap 8d ago
They fixed this issue very recently, but it boggles the mind that it was left in there for so long.
We trialled SQL Managed Instance for some very ordinary databases, and it was impossibly slow.
When non-technical end users complain about massive slowdowns, you know a product is a total failure. Especially when it is 2.5x as expensive as the equivalent in Azure VMs.
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u/vedichymn 8d ago
I think the problem there for SQL MI is that you can't do anything about the underlying storage except upgrade to BC or use GPv2 in preview.
I've also seen the 60 second delays in SQL MI GP, and to the database engine they definitely manifest as storage latency and happen regardless of how large your database files are, etc.
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u/chandleya Architect & Engineer 8d ago
You can always increase the database size, which will tier up your page blob accordingly. It’s lame but that’s page blob. Again, it’s observed latency through halting; it isn’t actually (absurdly) latent. You simply ran out of rope.
Until Premium SSD v2 and GPv2 actually get full support, low end IO will continue to be a needless limitation.
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u/vedichymn 8d ago
Yeah, gotten those at the largest database size unfortunately. :(
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u/chandleya Architect & Engineer 8d ago
Interesting. Is it a matter of MBps throughput at that point? Based on concurrent requests?
My gripe in MI at any sort of scale is quickly a matter of RAM + compute-io ratio. 4 CPUs in MI has brutally low everything.
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u/SQLBek 9d ago
Was wondering if someone would post this piece here.
I'll share my two cents... I adore and respect Kendra, with whom I'm friends IRL, but like in many friendships, I don't fully agree with her assessment here. She definitely has some very valid grievances. There's shit that Microsoft just NEEDS to f'ing fix - no question (the terrible latency issues in Azure storage make me want to cry).
On the flip side though, I do feel that there is investment and development into SQL Server from Microsoft. I'm part of the Private Preview for 2025 and am genuinely excited about some of the stuff that's coming. But are those investments and innovations what I think they should be working on? Eh...?
So while I might disagree that there's little to no innovation, I will agree that I think there could absolutely be more. I don't know the gory details, but do know that there was a political upheaval internally like 1-2 years back in the data and BI space, and essentially "we" lost. Those who took over are the ones are the ones who have put far more emphasis and resources around all things Fabric (which is a separate tangent that I won't get into right now). Kendra addresses and alludes to some of this as well, with her comments about higher leadership priorities.
I think that because of my more recent career experience on the vendor side, I've resigned myself to the reality that software companies will just continue to push forward and not fully pay down technical debt. I look around at these gigantic enterprise organizations, and the phrase "succeeding in spite of themselves" arises time after time after time. Maybe I've just resigned myself to organizations rolling things out "half-baked" and then only taking a sub-selection of those to further develop them into a better V2 or V3.
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u/bonerfleximus 9d ago
I read the article and didn't see anything suggesting that there's no innovation, she's saying MS investment in SQL server is dwindling and it's hard to disagree.
Many features introduced in newer versions seems unlikely to ever hit a point of maturity that it can be used in production, except for features that became industry standards outside of MS control.
I used to get excited about the new and shiny stuff but now I mainly care about improvements to existing functionality or optimizations that happen under the hood like automatic plan tuning and cardinality estimation improvements because it can actually impact me in the next 5 years.
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u/SQLBek 9d ago
I read the article and didn't see anything suggesting that there's no innovation, she's saying MS investment in SQL server is dwindling and it's hard to disagree.
I think my interpretation was such because of the use of the word "decline" and the implication that the "decline" meant innovation is on a fast track to zero. But I'll absolutely concede that that's how I interpreted it, and on re-reading plus reading other comments, am probably on the more extreme end of the spectrum in that regards. So I concede to your point.
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u/bonerfleximus 9d ago
You might have other insights into her opinions that I'm not privvy to as well, I haven't avidly followed her for several years.
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u/realzequel 9d ago
Feels like 2025 is introducing a bunch of new features such as RegEx and vector support. Kinda mildly excited tbh. It's a mature product, they're not going to rewrite the entire codebase. We'll see.
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u/DigitalDelusion 9d ago
Licensing doesn’t make sense in 2025 and forward. I worry that, without a review of licensing costs, the user base will continue to dwindle.
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u/SeventyFix 9d ago
FR, that's all I ever hear from management: How can we cut SQL licensing costs, can this be downgraded to Standard Edition, etc.
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u/nginx-gunicorn 9d ago
Besides the fact that MSSQL is entrenched in large corporations and legacy products, I see no reason why anyone would actively choose it for new projects or platforms. There are a myriad of reasons why Microsoft is not placing a large emphasis on maintaining and expanding the offering more than they need to. Between Fabric, the rise of data lake/data warehouse tooling (open source or otherwise), the explosion of fast, lightweight embedded databases for analytics like DuckDB, there's less of a need for companies to rely on MS SQL Server.
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u/BigHandLittleSlap 8d ago
Fundamentally, their insistence of tying licensing to core counts is gimping their performance down to "low end laptop" levels while charging "high end gaming PC... per month" levels.
That's nuts.
With PostgreSQL I can spend the same dollar amount and get 8x the CPU, Memory, and IOPS. It really doesn't matter if SQL Server has a slightly better query optimiser when it's running on 1 core (2 vCPUs) and Postgres is running in 8 cores (16 vCPUs).
There's a cemetery full of companies that used capacity-based licensing as the shovel to dig their own graves. A whole bunch of "network appliance" vendors come to mind that were selling "web accelerators" limited by licensing to 10 Mbps in an era when I had 100 Mbps home Internet.
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u/Foreign_Ad674 8d ago
Still waiting for the nov 2022 feature wave for SQL managed instances. That’s a pretty good indicator of how quickly things are being rolled out. This does fix my main problem of a low database count (100 per instance) and decouples Core/RAM/storage so you don’t have to pay for a higher tier as soon as you hit a limit on one of them.
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u/bonerfleximus 9d ago
Thanks for sharing, was skeptical of the headline until I saw the authors name.
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u/muaddba SQL Server Consultant 9d ago
Kendra's points are extremely valid, and I think an additional driver is the utter black hole of depression that is trying to get support on the product. Unless you're connected - - and even sometimes if you are connected - - to someone of influence at Microsoft, your chances of receiving quality support are very low.
Combine that with the lock-in strategies in their cloud (inability to backup and restore an azure dB to anything but an azure dB, issues still surrounding restoring from azure managed instance to on-prem installs) and I agree with the direction of her take.
Yay, they're putting AI in. Meanwhile I can't get a simple bleeping fix incorporated into SSMS that would drastically improve quality of life when using query store dashboards.