This Week’s Power App: SQL Server 2016 SP2 CU2, SP1 CU10

After a brief yatus (that’s a Big Brother joke for the other 3 of you out there watching this season, who will now also get the reference in the title – you’re welcome – the rest of you are in for a very confusing post), Microsoft released the next round of patches.

Fixes and improvements include:

• DAG improvement – automatically seed replicas – when you add a database to an existing AG, SQL Server can automatically seed it across the secondary replicas. I know a lot of SaaS companies who will get excited about these new Swaggy AGs.
• AGs – configurable session_timeouts
• AGs – slow transactions with 1 sync and 1 async secondary
• AGs – on cross-data-center AG failover, you get a non-yielding scheduler and a crash (not much details in this one, so Bayleigh probably secretly took the primary nominations off the block)
• AGs – queries on secondary take twice as long (absolutely no details on root cause here either, like Microsoft is trying to backdoor us)
• AGs – VSS backups fail on secondary replicas in a Basic Availability Group (which technically you’re not supposed to do, but you can still back up the entire secondary VM, and that’s where the problem looks like it’s coming in)
• AGs – fixing error 19432 for duplicate log blocks
• Log shipping – add support for Transparent Data Encryption by configuring MAXTRANSFERSIZE.
• Dynamic data masking doesn’t
• SSAS crashes when Process Full follows Process Clear – I love the line “you will notice that the SSAS may crash.” Zingbot is writing KB articles now.
• Memory dump when you merge partitioned temporal tables – basically, when you take someone off the block.
• Stats updates can get a “corrupted index” message and a disconnect
• Assertion error when you add a database
• Slow performance when Query Store is enabled
• Non-yielding schedulers require a reboot – quite possibly the least informative KB article ever. “Assume that you have a Microsoft SQL Server 2016 installed.” Hoo boy. Someone needs to spend a little more time in the Diary Room.

And there’s more listed in their KB articles. The downloads are arriving at your doorstep now via Hamazon Swine (last Big Brother joke today, we promise) or you can download SQL 2016 SP2 CU2 and/or SP1 CU10. For the record, I’m rooting for Faysal and Sam.