The big news this week in SQL Server is the seemingly un-notable release of SQL Server Management Studio 18.5. Scanning the release notes there’s a few new features added but no black theme to the chagrin of many in the SQL Server community it seems. There’s also quite a lot of fixes in this release which is always welcomed however I don’t think that the annoying multi-monitor bug that leaves the query window blank has been fixed as of yet.
If you’re running SQL Server 2017 anywhere there’s also Cumulative Update 20 to test in UAT.
For me this week I got the opportunity to have a self-training day for the company I work for and experiment with (the bizarrely named I must say) Infor OS. I’m not quite there yet with the install but I did decide on creating a Windows Server Core based domain controller and SQL Server to test these on my company issued laptop. I have never really tried server core and I’ve never been asked about it in nearly 4 years of consulting either. It wasn’t as difficult to work with as I first thought and it makes a whole lot of sense to have many cut down Operating System Environments (OSE in Microsoft speak) supporting a single application or role each as opposed to a fully loaded OSE running absolutely everything. It also surely must have been easier on my 4 core, 16GB Laptop as well given that I ended up with 4 Virtual Machines to work on.