Wise Owl's monthly (ish) news tweet | Issue 93 - Christmas/New Year 2025/26

The items included in this newsletter are listed below. Our newsletter go out about once a month - if you'd like to subscribe, just let us know!

SQL Server 2025 is here, with changes for SQL itself, Management Studio and JSON and vector data

This year Santa is bringing you SQL Server 2005, released on November 18th (the Developer version is the one most people will want to download, largely because it's free subject to the licence conditions). The highlight of the new edition must be the Mango Paradise theme you can apply in Management Studio:

Introducing colour themes for SSMS is surely like asking what colour finish you want for your raspberry pi?

Here's our take on the changes introduced by this major new software release, as they affect SQL developers:

A summary of the main changes for the new version of SQL Server Management Studio
The SQL language now includes regular expression handling, fuzzy string matching and more
There's a new json data type and a slew of new JSON functions, as explained in this JSON in SQL masterclass
There's a new vector data type to hold columns of numbers (you can see why - and how you'd use them - in this blog)

Note that many of the new language features require your database to have compatibility level 170 or higher (ie a database created in - or upgraded to - SQL Server 2025).

Watch the video from our inaugural Webinar, or book onto our next one!

Thanks to the 20 people who attended our first Webinar (on Power Automate Desktop) at the end of last week - we hope you had a productive lunch hour! You can see the video of the webinar here:

The start of the webinar video.

Our next webinar is on scraping websites using Power Automate Desktop (PAD is free software included within Windows) - join us on Friday 12th December for an entertaining and educational lunch hour!

Excel gets useful new DROP and TAKE functions, and a new interface for getting data

Excel now has two new functions allowing you to choose which rows and columns you want to include (or exclude) from a fomula - we've written separate blogs explaining the TAKE function and the DROP function.

An example of the sort of thing you can do with the TAKE function.

Excel also has a new-style interface for extracting data from other sources using the Get Data menu, although this is in preview for now.

The small November Power BI update condemns this to be the least-read article in this newsletter!

November's update to Power BI Desktop finally replaces the old card and multi-card visuals, brings improvement to the image visual and allows matrix column widths to expand to fill their containing visual:

The updated visuals toolbar.

However, this probably won't be enough to make many people read the details!

Think a Lego train for your cats is a bit OTT? How about an entire subway system?

This video on how to construct a cat-sized Lego train is strangely addictive to watch (it's one of an engrossing series about solving ever-more-complicated Lego challenges):

The start of the video.

Or if you think that's still not giving your cat the attention it deserves, how about building a full-sized subway?

A Christmas quiz with a chance to win £50, and the AI implications of last month's puzzle winner

It's time for our traditional annual Christmas Quiz! Previous participants will know that this is designed to entertain and inform, but isn't necessarily designed to be easy!

One of the 20 questions, to tempt you.

The first person whose name is drawn out of WENCESLAS (our Weighted Excel Name Chooser for Equitably Selecting Listed Answers Stochastically) will win a £50 voucher, with your chances of winning being proportional to the number of answers you get correct.

Last month we asked you to write a system to test word chains. The only 2 answers received pitted man against machine, with profound implications for the future career prospects of programmers.

Note that to keep our website content up-to-date we only publish newsletters from the last 3 calendar years.

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