What’s new in SQL Server 2022?

SQL Server 2022 builds on previous releases to grow SQL Server as a platform that gives you choices of development languages, data types, on-premises or cloud environments, and operating systems.

Feature highlights

The following sections identify features that are improved our introduced in SQL Server 2022:

• Analytics
• Availability
• Security
• Performance
• Query Store and intelligent query processing
• Management
• Platform

Analytics

Azure Synapse Link for SQL
Get near real time analytics over operational data in SQL Server 2022 (16.x). With a seamless integration between operational stores in SQL Server 2022 and Azure Synapse Analytics dedicated SQL pools, Azure Synapse Link for SQL enables you to run analytics, business intelligence and machine learning scenarios on your operational data with minimum impact on source databases with a new change feed technology.

Object storage integration
SQL Server 2022 introduces new object storage integration to the data platform, enabling you to integrate SQL Server with S3-compatible object storage, in addition to Azure Storage. The first is backup to URL and the second is Data Lake Virtualization.

Data Virtualization
Query different types of data on different types of data sources from SQL Server.

Availability

Link to Azure SQL Managed Instance
Connect your SQL Server instance to Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Contained availability group
Create an Always On availability group that:
– Manages its own metadata objects (users, logins, permissions, SQL Agent jobs etc.) at the availability group level in addition to the instance level.
– Includes specialized contained system databases within the availability group.

Distributed availability group
Now using multiple TCP connections for better network bandwidth utilization across a remote link with long tcp latencies.

Security

Microsoft Defender for Cloud integration
Protect your SQL servers using the Defender for SQL plan. Defender for SQL plan requires that SQL Server Extension for Azure is enabled and includes functionalities for discovering and mitigating potential database vulnerabilities and detecting anomalous activities that could indicate a threat to your databases. Learn more on how Defender for SQL can protect your entire database estate anywhere: on-premises, hybrid, and multicloud environments.

Microsoft Purview integration
Apply Microsoft Purview access policies to any SQL Server instance that is enrolled in both Azure Arc and the Microsoft Purview Data Use Management.
– Newly introduced SQL Performance Monitor, and SQL Security Auditor roles align with the principle of least privilege using Microsoft Purview access policies.

Ledger
The ledger feature provides tamper-evidence capabilities in your database. You can cryptographically attest to other parties, such as auditors or other business parties, that your data hasn’t been tampered with

Azure Active Directory authentication
Use Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication to connect to SQL Server.

Always encrypted with secure enclaves
Support for JOIN, GROUP BY, and ORDER BY, and for text columns using UTF-8 collations in confidential queries using enclaves. Improved performance.

Access Control: Permissions
New granular permissions improve adherence with the Principle of Least Privilege

Access Control: Server-level Roles
New built-in server-level roles enable least privileged access for administrative tasks that apply to the whole SQL Server Instance

Dynamic data masking
Granular UNMASK permissions for Dynamic Data Masking.

Support for PFX certificates, and other cryptographic improvements
New support for import and export of PFX file formatted certificates and private keys. Ability to backup and restore master keys to Azure Blob Storage. SQL Server-generated certificates now have a default RSA key size of 3072-bits.

Added BACKUP SYMMETRIC KEY and RESTORE SYMMETRIC KEY.

Support MS-TDS 8.0 protocol
New MS-TDS protocol iteration:
– Makes encryption mandatory
– Aligns MS-TDS with HTTPS making it manageable by network appliances for additional security
– Removes MS-TDS / TLS custom interleaving and enables usage of TLS 1.3 and subsequent TLS protocol versions.

Performance

System page latch concurrency enhancements
Concurrent updates to global allocation map (GAM) pages and shared global allocation map (SGAM) pages reduce page latch contention while allocating/deallocating data pages and extents. These enhancements apply to all user databases and especially benefit tempdb heavy workloads.

Buffer pool parallel scan
Improves the performance of buffer pool scan operations on large-memory machines by utilizing multiple CPU cores. Learn more about Operations that trigger a buffer pool scan may run slowly on large-memory computers.

Ordered clustered columnstore index
Ordered clustered columnstore index (CCI) sorts the existing data in memory before the index builder compresses the data into index segments. This has the potential of more efficient segment elimination, resulting in better performance as the number of segments to read from disk is reduced.

Improved columnstore segment elimination
All columnstore indexes benefit from enhanced segment elimination by data type. Data type choices may have a significant impact on query performance based common filter predicates for queries on the columnstore index. This segment elimination applied to numeric, date, and time data types, and the datetimeoffset data type with scale less than or equal to two. Beginning in SQL Server 2022 (16.x), segment elimination capabilities extend to string, binary, guid data types, and the datetimeoffset data type for scale greater than two.

In-memory OLTP management
Improve memory management in large memory servers to reduce out-of-memory conditions.

Virtual log file growth
In previous versions of SQL Server, if the next growth is more than 1/8 of the current log size, and the growth is less than 64MB, four VLFs were created. In SQL Server 2022 (16.x), this behavior is slightly different. Only one VLF is created if the growth is less than or equal to 64 MB and more than 1/8 of the current log size.

Thread management
– ParallelRedoThreadPool : Instance level thread pool shared with all databases having redo work. With this, each database can take the benefit of parallel redo. Limited to max 100 thread earlier.
– Parallel redo batch redo – Redo of log records are batched under one latch improving speed. This improves recovery, catchup redo, and crash recovery redo.

Reduced buffer pool I/O promotions
Reduced the incidents of a single page being promoted to eight pages when populating the buffer pool from storage, causing unnecessary I/O. The buffer pool can be populated more efficiently by the read-ahead mechanism. This change was introduced in SQL Server 2022 (all editions) and included in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Enhanced spinlock algorithms
Spinlocks are a huge part of the consistency inside the engine for multiple threads. Internal adjustments to the Database Engine make spinlocks more efficient. This change was introduced in SQL Server 2022 (all editions) and included in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Improved virtual log file (VLF) algorithms
Virtual File Log (VLF) is an abstraction of the physical transaction log. Having a large number of small VLFs based on log growth can affect performance of operations like recovery. We changed the algorithm for how many VLF files we create during certain log grow scenarios.

Instant file initialization for transaction log file growth events
In general, transaction log files cannot benefit from instant file initialization (IFI). Starting with SQL Server 2022 (all editions) and in Azure SQL Database, instant file initialization can benefit transaction log growth events up to 64 MB. The default auto growth size increment for new databases is 64 MB. Transaction log file autogrowth events larger than 64 MB cannot benefit from instant file initialization.

Query Store and intelligent query processing

The intelligent query processing (IQP) feature family includes features that improve the performance of existing workloads with minimal implementation effort.

Query Store on secondary replicas
Query Store on secondary replicas enables the same Query Store functionality on secondary replica workloads that is available for primary replicas. Learn more in Query Store for secondary replicas.

Query Store hints
Query Store hints leverage the Query Store to provide a method to shape query plans without changing application code. Previously only available on Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, Query Store hints are now available in SQL Server 2022 (16.x). Requires the Query Store to be enabled and in “Read write” mode.

Memory grant feedback
Memory grant feedback adjusts the size of the memory allocated for a query based on past performance. SQL Server 2022 introduces Percentile and Persistence mode memory grant feedback. Requires enabling Query Store.
– Persistence: A capability that allows the memory grant feedback for a given cached plan to be persisted in the Query Store so that feedback can be reused after cache evictions. Persistence benefits memory grant feedback as well as the new DOP and CE feedback features.
– Percentile: A new algorithm improves performance of queries with widely oscillating memory requirements, using memory grant information from several previous query executions over, instead of just the memory grant from the immediately preceding query execution. Requires enabling Query Store. Query Store is enabled by default for newly created databases as of SQL Server 2022 CTP 2.1.

Parameter sensitive plan optimization
Automatically enables multiple, active cached plans for a single parameterized statement. Cached execution plans accommodate largely different data sizes based on the customer-provided runtime parameter value(s).

Degree of parallelism (DOP) feedback
A new database scoped configuration option DOP_FEEDBACK automatically adjusts degree of parallelism for repeating queries to optimize for workloads where inefficient parallelism can cause performance issues. Similar to optimizations in Azure SQL Database. Requires the Query Store to be enabled and in “Read write” mode.

Cardinality estimation feedback
Identifies and corrects suboptimal query execution plans for repeating queries, when these issues are caused by incorrect estimation model assumptions. Requires the Query Store to be enabled and in “Read write” mode.

Optimized plan forcing
Uses compilation replay to improve the compilation time for forced plan generation by pre-caching non-repeatable plan compilation steps. Learn more in Optimized plan forcing with Query Store.

Management

Integrated setup experience for the Azure extension for SQL Server
Install the Azure extension for SQL Server at setup. Required for Azure integration features.

Manage Azure extension for SQL Server
Use SQL Server Configuration Manager to manage Azure extension for SQL Server service. Required to create Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server instance, and for other Azure connected features.

Max server memory calculations
During setup, SQL Setup recommends a value for max server memory to align with documented recommendations. The underlying calculation is different in SQL Server 2022 to reflect recommended server memory configuration options.

Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) improvements
There are several improvements to address persistent version store (PVS) storage and improve overall scalability. SQL Server 2022 implements a persistent version store cleaner thread per database instead of per instance and the memory footprint for PVS page tracker has been improved. There are also several ADR efficiency improvements, such as concurrency improvements that help the cleanup process to work more efficiently. ADR cleans pages that couldn’t previously be cleaned due to locking.

Improved snapshot backup support
Adds Transact-SQL support for freezing and thawing I/O without requiring a VDI client. Create a Transact-SQL snapshot backup.

Shrink database WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY
In previous releases, shrinking databases and database files to reclaim space often leads to concurrency issues. SQL Server 2022 adds WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY as an additional option for shrink operations (DBCC SHRINKDATABASE and DBCC SHRINKFILE). When you specify WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY, new queries requiring Sch-S or Sch-M locks aren’t blocked by the waiting shrink operation, until the shrink operation stops waiting and begins executing.

XML compression
XML compression provides a method to compress off-row XML data for both XML columns and indexes, improving capacity requirements.

Asynchronous auto update statistics concurrency
Avoid potential concurrency issues using asynchronous statistics update if you enable the ASYNC_STATS_UPDATE_WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY database-scoped configuration.

Backup and restore to S3-compatible object storage
SQL Server 2022 extends the BACKUP/RESTORE TO/FROM URL syntax by adding support for a new S3 connector using the REST API.

Platform

SQL Server Native Client (SNAC) has been removed
The SQL Server Native Client (often abbreviated SNAC) has been removed from SQL Server 2022 and SQL Server Management Studio 19 (SSMS). The SQL Server Native Client (SQLNCLI or SQLNCLI11) and the legacy Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server (SQLOLEDB) are not recommended for new development. Switch to the new Microsoft OLE DB Driver (MSOLEDBSQL) for SQL Server or the latest Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server going forward.

Hybrid buffer pool with direct write
Reduces the number of memcpy commands that need to be performed on modified data or index pages residing on PMEM devices. This enlightenment is now available for Window 2022 as well as Linux.

Integrated acceleration & offloading
SQL Server 2022 leverages acceleration technologies from partners such as Intel to provide extended capabilities. At release, Intel® QuickAssist Technology (QAT) provides backup compression and hardware offloading.

Improved optimization
SQL Server 2022 leverages new hardware capabilities, including the Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) 512 extension to improve batch mode operations.

Please notice the following:

Installation of SQL Server 2022 is supported on x64 processors only. It is no longer supported on x86 processors.

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As you install SQL Server 2022, it is important to note that both SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Reporting Services are now separate installs from the database engine and other components. Management Studio has a different release cycle from SQL Server and is updated monthly.

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