Microsoft announced at the Ignite conference that SQL Server 2022 is on the way, and several significant new features should convince many organizations to upgrade soon after it’s available. It’s been three long years since SQL Server 2019 arrived, so these announcements are exciting to hear.

Microsoft will announce details and additional features over the next few months, but to see demos of the announcements from Ignite, take a look at this video from Bob Ward. Microsoft is also presenting deep dive sessions of all the features at the PASS Data Community Summit, November 8 – 12. If you register before the Community Keynote on November 12th, you will receive exclusive access to the session recordings for six months, so don’t wait. Sign up today!

Here are the two features that I’m looking forward to trying:

Failover to Azure SQL Managed Instance

With just a couple of clicks, you can attach a database to the cloud. This action sets up an Availability Group (AG) between an on-premises SQL Server and Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI), which you can use for disaster recovery or offloading a read-only workload. You can then manually failover to the MI and back. It’s also possible to restore a backup from a MI to SQL Server 2022.

Instead of managing hardware or virtual machines in multiple data centers, you can let Microsoft do the work for you with Azure SQL Managed Instances saving money, effort, and time.

Parameter sensitive plan optimization

Beginning with SQL Server 2022, multiple plans can be cached for a query. If there are two possible plans for a query, the plan will switch between a scan and a seek depending on the number of rows processed. This new feature solves those pesky parameter sniffing issues that cause so many performance issues. I’ve been hoping to see this improvement for years and can’t wait to see what else is in store.

Microsoft also announced Azure Synapse Link with SQL Server for real-time analytics without ETL, Azure Purview Integration, SQL Server Ledger for data tampering protection, and much more. Don’t miss all of the announcements and demos of the new features at PASS Data Community Summit.

SQL Server is a game-changer with something for everyone. I can’t wait to get my hands on the preview!