Microsoft SQL Server – upgrade and sharpen your DBA and developer skills

Components and installation

1. Components of SQL Server
   • Instance features
   • Shared features
2. Installation
   • Overview
   • New setup options
3. Upgrade
   • Upgrade considerations
   • Supported version upgrades
4. Tools
   • SQL Server Management Studio
   • Azure Data Studio
   • SQL Server Data Tools

Azure offerings overview

1. Relational engine options
   • Overview
   • Virtual Machine
   • Azure SQL Database
   • Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly SQL Data Warehouse)
   • Managed Instances
   • Azure SQL Edge
2. Other DBMSs
   • Overview
   • Cosmos DB
   • Azure Data Lake

Security

1. General security improvements 
   • Various things
   • New commands
   • Contained database
   • Row-level security
   • Vulnerability Assessment
2.  Encryption and masking of data
   • Dynamic Data Masking
   • TDE
   • Always Encrypted
3. Data discovery and classification
   • Data classification
   • Data discovery

Transact-SQL enhancements

1. General stuff
   • SC collations
   • UTF-8
2. DDL
   • Various things
   • Temporal tables
3. DML
   • Various things
   • Data truncation error
   • Windowing
   • JSON
   • New functions
   • Investigating physical structures
4.  Graph
   • What is Graph?
   • Graph DDL
   • Graph DML
   • 2019 improvements

Indexes

1. General stuff
   • Index types
   • Syntax
   • Index options
   • Relaxed restrictions
   • Resumable index operations
2. Columnstore indexes
   • Columnstore architecture
   • Segment alignment
   • Maintenance and "fragmentation"
   • Columnstore history

Performance

1. Optimizer changes and enhancements
   • Background
   • Optimizer fixes, OF
   • Cardinality estimator, CE
   • Optimizer enhancements, OE
   • Controlling OF, CE and OE
   • Optimizer improvements and settings
   • The "intelligent performance" umbrella
2. Query Store
   • Query store architecture
   • Query store settings
   • Catalog views and GUI
3. Live Query Statistics and Lightweight Profiling
   • Live Query Statistics
   • Lightweight Profiling
4. In-Memory OLTP
   • What is it?
   • Steps to use it
   • Improvements over time

Management

1. Tempdb
   • Tempdb potential issues
   • Tempdb improvements
2. Backup
   • Backup to URL
   • Other backup enhancements
3. Configuration options
   • Instance-level
   • Database level
   • ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION
   • Other settings
4. High availability and disaster recovery
   • Misc HA/DR
   • Failover Clustered Instances
   • Availability Groups
5. Extended Events
6. New DMVs