News

SQL Server 2022 Public Preview Coming This Year

• By Kurt Mackie
• April 12, 2022

Microsoft said that SQL Server 2022 is nearing a public preview release, and is set for sometime later this year.

An Early Adoption Program for SQL Server 2022, which had offered a private preview of Microsoft's coming new relational database management solution, has been closed. Microsoft is now planning to offer a public preview of SQL Server 2022 "by the end of the first half of calendar year 2022."

The shift to a public preview release had been announced last month by Bob Ward, a principal program manager for SQL Server. He made the announcement at the end of an "Azure Data" SQLBits event, which mostly described Azure SQL capabilities. However, a slide presented early on in his talk listed the top SQL Server 2022 additions as follows:

• Built-in query intelligence
• Security, scalability and availability
• Managed DR [disaster recovery] with Azure SQL
• Link to [Azure] Synapse for near-real-time analytics
• Azure Purview use for centralizing insights and governance

On the built-in query intelligence side, Microsoft has turned on Query Store by default in SQL Server 2022. Query Store automatically captures the history and run-time statistics of queries, which can be helpful for performance assessments and troubleshooting. Microsoft also added support for read replicas from availability groups, and it enhanced Intelligent Query Processing for optimizing workloads.

The security of SQL Server 2022 is enhanced with SQL Server Ledger, a blockchain electronic ledger solution that assures against data tampering.

The disaster recovery enhancement in SQL Server 2022 enables connections with Azure SQL Managed Instance via a Link feature, which will "continuously replicate data to and from the cloud," according to Microsoft's datasheet explanation.

Azure Synapse is Microsoft's data governance service that maps data across an organization's premises, as well as cloud services they use. The use an Azure Synapse Link feature will enable analytics on premises-based operational data. Organizations can use the scanned metadata with other services, such as the Microsoft Information Protection service, which is used to classify data.

With the coming public preview, IT pros will be able to test some SQL Server 2022 capabilities. The top features to test, according to Microsoft, include Azure Synapse Link, disaster recovery via Azure SQL Managed Instance and Intelligent Query Processing, along with Azure Active Directory authentication, JSON data functionality and scalability enhancements, the announcement suggested. There's integrations with various Azure services as well.