Google Antigravity

These days every one in developer world is talking about Google's Antigravity. So I was also curious  to find about it.

So what is Google's Antigravity? Well, it is Integrated Development Environment (i.e. IDE), similar to popular IDEs like cursor, windsurf and VSCode. Like all of above mentioned, it is a fork of VSCode.

So what is the uniqueness of that? Well, that's what I want to find out too. As per Google, it is not only an IDE, it is an agent management system. In order to find out about more, I decided to install and test.

You can download Google's Antigravity from this site. Available for Mac, Windows and some Linux distributions (e.g. Ubantu 20+). Windows installation is about 152 MB.

Setup starts with usual User Agreement screen:

Then you get to choose the installation location. You will require about 800 MB disk space for this. Next screen allows you to select additional tasks.

Installation is relatively quick (will depend on your computer/disk speed, took only 2min on mine).

Once installed, unlike VSCode, you are taken through setup wizard.

You can import your setting from other similar IDEs. But I choose to start fresh as I didn't want to effect all the testings I have done with other IDEs.

In next step you can select the theme (light, dark, solarized light, tokyo night). I choose dark of course.

Next step is vital. You get to choose how autonomus your agents will be within IDE.

Since this is local installation, agent get access can access all resource in your system, something you might not want to happen. There fore you can select how much freedom you are given to agents. You have 4 options:

• Secure mode is the safest, in this more agent will ask permission for everything before it go and do something.
• Review driven development (whic is the recomended), require you to review what agent is going to do before it does.
• Agent-driven development -> Give more freedome to agent to do most tasks.
• Custom configuraiton allows you to configure which tasks are allowed and which are not allowed.

In next step you configure your editor.

In order to use Antigravity for free, you need google and gmail account. Wizard will ask you to sign in to this account in next screen.

Final screen is on terms of use.

This is what opening screen looks like:

It is some what similar to VSCode. Note the "Agent Manager" button in the second row in middle. I think is the uniqueness of the IDE.

I will have a play and let you know how my experience is in future blogs.

Installing SSMS 22 for SQL 2025

 

Since we already have SQL Server Installation running from previous blog post, easiest thing was to launch the SSMS from same wizard.

Which will redirect you to this URL.

You will find a button to download the SSMS setup, save the exe to disk and run it.

Most probably the first thing you will see when you launch setup is setup downloading latest setup it self.

Note that SSMS installation also have the same UI as Visual Studio installation.

This is what you first presented with, similar to Visual Studio installation, now you need to select which components you are going to install for SSMS.

Core SSMS components are already selected and cannot be deselect (see right hand side column).

You can choose to install following components:

• AI Assistance (Github Copilot)
• Business Intelligence (SSAS, SSRS, SSIS tools integration with VS)
• Hybrid and Migration tools
• Code Tools (Version control -> GIT and Query Hints)

For my testing I have selected all.

For me it showed total disk requirement is 3.42GB (hmm).

You can further customize the installation by selecting/un-selecting individual components (if required) in "Individual Components" tab.

You can select additional language packs in next tab, if required. I have left it with English.

"Installation Locations" tab, you can change the default installation location.

Once you happy, with all configuration, press "Install" button.

During the installation, you will see following:

After the installation, you can launch the SSMS as you would do normally and here is the new splash screen with welcome changes:

New connection dialog box and new UI is also appealing:

Your recent connections can be found on the top, which is I think very useful feature. Rest of the dialog is familiar to any one who used SSMS 20. 

If you not already familiar with "Encryption" box on connection dialog (which was also in SSMS 20), make sure to select optional. Otherwise you will not be able to connect to SQL server which doesn't have an SSL connection.

Copilot window can be seen in the right side, which is also a interesting addition.

First thing I configured is "Color Theme" to new Dark Mode:

Oh I love that feature, which was missing for ages.

There are many more themes:

That's all for now. I will explore more and let you know if there are anything interesting.

Installing SQL Server 2025

Microsoft has recently release SQL Server 2025. So it is my time to get it hands on.

One of the thing they highlight in this release is AI ready, but I have my doubts on that. SQL Server 2025 i.e. version 17 has vector data type support in-built, which is why they say it is AI ready. But how useful is that? We will see.

One other major thing I see is discontinuation of "Web" edition. Probably not a significant thing for most, but, as a developer and DBA involved in SME (Small and Medium Enterprises), we edition was a very attractive cost reduction option. So I'm kind of disappointed with this.

Resource Governor is now available for standard edition, which is good and also express edition now support up to 50GB database. All these are good for SME sector.

There are two developer editions now:

1. Standard Developer Edition
2. Enterprise Developer Edition

They provide feature of corresponding edition to developer for free.

You can get more information about SQL Server 2025 from it's official page -> here.

I have tried Standard Developer Edition, as I'm mostly work on standard Edition.

Setup file is about 1.2 GB in size, so note that when you download it.

First of all new icon is looking good and modern.

When you start the wizard you get decade old starting screen. I think it is big time that Microsoft need to modernize this?

I went for new installation.

Then you need to choose, the edition you want to install. Note that there is lot more options in there now, such as pay-as-you-go edition via Azure subscription. That's looks cool.

I'm installing Standard Developer edition.

Then you accept the licensing terms.

After that, installation will check for further updates to installation and check installation rules (requirements). Of course there is usual warning on Firewall rules, this can be setup later once installation is done.

Next, you are presented with "Azure Extension for SQL Server". This allows on-premise SQL server to be part of your Azure management group, so you can manage them from a central location. I think this is another cool feature. For my testing purpose, I will just skip this.

You presented with familiar, feature selection page, when you press Next on above screen. I have just selected SQL server database engine. Note that there is new "AI service and Language Extension" feature, which I will skip for now.

Also note the link to download, BI Report server as there is no more Reporting Services.

When you press next on above page, setup will check feature rules (any conflicts and pre-requisite missing).

Then you are presented with feature configuration. This will be vary depending on features you have selected.

I have gone for named instance, since I already have default instance used for previous version of the installation. Note that setup has identified my version 15 installation and it has put the edition as "Enterprise Developer" (there was only one developer edition back then).

Server configuration page:

In Database Engine configuration page, you have few tabs to configure.

First Authentication tab:

I have gone for mixed mode authentication, because I needed offline authentication for testing. Nothing seems to be new in this tab.

Next tab, you choose directories for various tasks:

Since this is just a demo, I will be using the defaults.

TempDB configuration is much more detail now. You can select multiple directories for tempdb data.

You can configure memory now during setup:

MaxDOP can be configured also:

Most of these were configurable later via server property page. In this version we have ability configure them setup time.

Now we are ready to install.

Time for the setup to complete will be vary depending on the features and options you have selected. But at the end you will see following dialog:

Next we will log into database using SSMS. Wait, we need to install new SSMS first for that, so let's take a look at that in next blog post.

Introduction to SQL Server Transactions (Transaction Isolation Part 4)

This is forth part of "Introduction to SQL Server Transaction" series. You can see previous sections below:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

In this part we discuss two SQL Server isolation levels in deep.

Read Uncommitted – The “Wild West” of Isolation

Read Uncommitted is the lowest isolation level. It allows dirty reads, non-repeatable reads, and phantoms – basically all issues relate to concurrency can be seen in this isolation level. No locks are taken on reads, so you can read uncommitted changes. 

We can set the isolation level to Read Uncommitted on SQL Server using statement like below:

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED;

Also in query level we can use query hint (NOLOCK) to force Read Uncommitted isolation level.

Example: Dirty-read scenario. A pending payment transaction withdraws $45 from Betty’s $78 balance, then rolls back. Meanwhile an ATM transaction (right) reads the balance as $33. The ATM saw a dirty value that never became final.

Demonstration:

-- Session A: Begin a transaction and update, but do not commit immediately.

BEGIN TRAN;

SELECT Balance FROM BankAccount WHERE AccountNumber = 'Betty'

-- This return $78

UPDATE BankAccount

SET Balance = Balance - 45

WHERE AccountNumber = 'Betty';

-- Wait or do other work before committing/rolling back...

WAITFOR DELAY '00:00:10';  

ROLLBACK;  

-- Session B (simulated concurrently): Read without locking

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED;

SELECT Balance FROM BankAccount WHERE AccountNumber = 'Betty';

SELECT in Session B will return 33 (assuming you have run the Session B within 10 second delay in Session A). But real balance is 78.

Under Read Uncommitted, SQL Server does not issue any shared locks on reads, so a select can return “dirty” changes from another transaction. The only advantage is maximum concurrency (no waiting), but at the cost of consistency: all anomalies can happen.

Read Committed – Default Safe Reads

Read Committed is the SQL Server default isolation level (when no explicit level is set). It prevents dirty reads: you will never see another transaction’s uncommitted changes. However, it still allows non-repeatable reads and phantoms (unless you enable row-versioning, more about this in later blog posts). 

In locking mode (SQL Server’s default), a read places shared locks that last only for the duration of each statement. If another transaction has an exclusive lock on a row, your SELECT will wait until that transaction commits or rolls back. Thus, Read Committed “protects” your reads from dirty data.

-- Session A: Start and update a row, but hold it.

BEGIN TRAN;

UPDATE BankAccount

SET Balance = Balance - 45

WHERE AccountNumber = 'Betty';

-- (Session A, not yet committed), carrying out other statement execution

-- Session B: Default Read Committed SELECT

SELECT Balance FROM BankAccount WHERE AccountNumber = 'Betty';

-- Session B will *wait* here until Session A commits or rolls back.

As you can see above, session B waits, in executing query mode (no results).

-- If Session A commits, B then sees the new balance (i.e. 33) ; if A rolls back, B sees the old balance (i.e. 78).

COMMIT;  -- Session A eventually commits or rollbacks

This will be the result in Session B:

In above demonstration, SQL server used row level exclusive lock in Session A. Then because of the default isolation level (i.e. Read committed), Session B has used shared lock. However, since "Betty's" row is exclusively locked by Session A, Session B couldn't get the shared lock on the row. Therefore, Session B (select) had to wait till Session A committed or rollback the transaction.

Since Session B had to wait, till Session A finishes, there were no dirty reads (didn't see the temporary balance of 33). But as you can see, we now have locking (i.e. Session B waiting) scenario. This is why you should handle isolation levels very carefully.

Furthermore, data can be changed by other transactions between individual statements… resulting in nonrepeatable reads or phantom data”. In other words, each SELECT in your transaction sees only committed data at that moment, but different SELECTs in the same transaction might see different results if other transactions commit in between.

BMAD Method - Part 1

Let me start by saying I'm not into Vibe coding. Mainly because I know one or two about coding and there fore I see far Vibe coding can go. But I'm not against people who do Vibe coding. It has given more people, rather than traditional programmers to develop their ideas in very short time, very cost effective way. Also Vibe coding is a tool when it comes to do rapid prototyping. Even well established software companies can use Vibe coding for producing demo software. So it is not something to ignore.

I can see Vibe Coding is now evolving, through context engineering. One of the interesting AI assisted coding method which evolved like that is BMAD method. 

BMAD - Breakthrough Method for Agile AI Driven Development.

Because it follows Agile principals of software development, this method has caught my attention. You can find more details about this method in above listed link.

There are many ways you can use this method. In fact, you can even use this method to analyze your life problems. But I'm more interested in using this in software development. There fore I started using this in VS Code through GitHub Copilot. Following describe how I started.

Before you installing BMAD framework, you need Node.js v20 or above.

Step 1: Install

Go to root of your development folder via terminal (command prompt). E.g. D:\Dev

Execute following

npx bmad-method install

You will see a screen similar to above. This will change as this framework get upgraded. Currently we are in version 4.44.3, but near the inevitable upgrade of version 6.

Step 2: Create project folder

Enter the path for the project. If it doesn't exist bmad installer will create it.

Step 3: Select what framework to install

There are few options to choose from, couple of them relate to game development. But for our purpose we use default "BMad Agile Core System". If you not sure choose this one and continue.

It will ask couple of questions regarding sharding of PRD and architect files. I will choose yes, because most of time these files are huge and having them separated to multiple file in logical points makes it easy for us to refer to them.

Step 4: Selecting IDE

I will be based on VSCode and GitHub Copilot.

It will ask following question:

* How would you like to configure GitHub Copilot settings?

Choose the default to make the process fast. Or choose manual if you want much tighter control.

* To install web bundles.

I will choose no to this. Because you can do the same thing you do with web bundles in IDE.

That's all.

Step 5: Then launch VSCode

You will see something like below when open the project

Step 6: Start Agent

Open Github Copilot Chat in Agent mode and then type:

*workflow-init

This will start BMad method in agent mode with following options:

If it is branch new project, I will start with item 1.

Get Windows Capabilities - Powershell

Recently I came across very useful PowerShell cmdlet to manage windows OS.

It is called Get-WindowsCapability

It is part of DISM module (the tool we discussed in last blog post).

In order to see all available capabilities (features), you can run following:

Get-WindowsCapability -Online

This shows, component along side with status (whether it is installed on current system or not)

E.g.

Name  : Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0

State : NotPresent

Name  : Microsoft.Windows.WordPad~~~~0.0.1.0

State : Installed

Capabilities can be categorized to several categories:

• .NET Framework 3.5
• RSAT tools (e.g. Active Directory, DHCP)
• Language packs
• OpenSSH Client/Server
• WordPad, PowerShell ISE, etc.

In the list category is shown as the first part of the name.

If you want to search for specific capability, you can do it using following PowerShell command:

Get-WindowsCapability -Online | Where-Object Name -like "*OpenSSH*"

If you want to installed a capability, you need to use a different cmdlet called "Add-WindowsCapability"

Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name "OpenSSH.Server~~~~0.0.1.0"

If you want to un-install a capability:

Remove-WindowsCapability -Online -Name "Microsoft.Windows.WordPad~~~~0.0.1.0"

This is very handy way to install components, when you are in a hurry.

Reclaiming Disk Space Safely - Method 1

I was cleaning up my old laptop (which my daughter is using now) and it was severely lacked disk space to operate. I tried conventional ways and able to get some space, but was not enough.

Analyzing the system, I could see there are there are several iteration of windows updates and multiple version of windows components are there. Most of these components are stored in WinSxS folder. Looking at the size of this folder, I could see it is huge.

WinSxS -> short name for Windows Side-by-Side.

How do I clean-up this folder? It was too risky to manually delete stuff in here as it is windows system component folder. There fore I turned to ChatGPT (in old days it would have been Google), to find the answer.

One of the suggestion by ChatGPT was to use dism command line tool.

What is dism command line tool?

DISM -> Deployment Image Servicing and Management. DISM can do lot more than cleaning up WinSxS folder. If you need to know more about it read this article from Microsoft.

You can use following command to analyze the component store:

Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

You will see output similar to below:

Component Store (WinSxS) information:

Windows Explorer Reported Size of Component Store : 9.17 GB

Actual Size of Component Store : 8.70 GB

    Shared with Windows : 4.04 GB

    Backups and Disabled Features : 4.66 GB

    Cache and Temporary Data :  0 bytes

Date of Last Cleanup : 2025-10-29 02:50:09

Number of Reclaimable Packages : 8

Component Store Cleanup Recommended : Yes

The operation completed successfully.

When you are ready to clean-up, run following command:

Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

If your system is stable and you are sure, you don't need to rollback any components add "resetbase" option to above command to clean-up further.

Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /resetbase

But after resetting, you will not be able to un-installed already installed updates.

Introduction to SQL Server Transactions (Transaction Isolation Part 3)

This is third part of "Introduction to SQL Server Transaction" series. You can see previous sections below:

Part 1

Part 2

In this part we discuss how SQL server has implemented concurrency control.

Locking and Versioning

SQL server uses following two techniques to implement concurrency control:

1. Locking
2. Versioning

Locking

Locking is the traditional mechanism SQL Server uses to isolate transactions.

When a transaction accesses data, SQL Server places locks on the data to prevent other transactions from making conflicting changes. Locking type and granularity decide the effect of the lock and the scale.

Locking Types: 

There are different types of locks SQL server can placed. Each lock type has some level of restrictions for other transactions. Here is summary of locking types and what it blocks:

We will have a talk about type of locks and locking in detail in future blogs.

Locking Granularity: Locks can be applied at row level, page level, table level, or even database level. Granularity allows SQL server to not to lock more objects than it required.

When lock is placed on row level, only that row is restricted from accessed by other transactions. Other rows are free to read and write operations, from other transactions. This reduce the blocking

Page level locks on the other hand locks all rows in that page from read or modification (depend on lock type). Same with table and database level locks, they lock more rows, hence more data and prone for more blocking issues.

Locking is primarily used in Read Committed, Repeatable Read, and Serializable isolation levels.

Versioning

Versioning uses a multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) approach. Instead of locking data for readers, SQL Server maintains row versions (multiple version of a row) in tempdb, allowing readers to see a consistent snapshot of the data.

When a row is modified, SQL Server keeps an older version in tempdb so that readers can still access the version valid at the start of their transaction or query.

This is a much recent technique and Isolation levels using versioning are Read Committed Snapshot (RCSI) and Snapshot Isolation (SI).

Versioning helps reduce blocking and deadlocks, improving concurrency.

Recycling IIS App Pools via Scheduled Task

Don't ask me why (it's complicated), but we had a situation where we wanted to recycle several of our production IIS App Pools on one of our web server.

We want to do this as a Windows Schedule Task, because it was required to be done during very early mornings (daily job, executed once).

Our initial plan was to have a PowerShell script and ran it through Windows Task Scheduler.

So we have asked a script from ChatGPT for that (BTW: who write PowerShell script manually these days?)

This is what was provided:

<#

.SYNOPSIS

    Recycles a specific IIS Application Pool.

.DESCRIPTION

    This script recycles a given IIS Application Pool using the WebAdministration module.

    You must run it with Administrator privileges.

.PARAMETER AppPoolName

    The name of the IIS Application Pool to recycle.

.EXAMPLE

    .\Recycle-AppPool.ps1 -AppPoolName "MyAppPool"

#>

param (

    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true)]

    [string]$AppPoolName

)

# Import IIS module

Import-Module WebAdministration -ErrorAction Stop

# Check if the app pool exists

$appPool = Get-ChildItem IIS:\AppPools | Where-Object { $_.Name -eq $AppPoolName }

if ($null -eq $appPool) {

    Write-Host "Application Pool '$AppPoolName' not found." -ForegroundColor Red

    exit 1

}

try {

    Write-Host "Recycling Application Pool: $AppPoolName ..." -ForegroundColor Cyan

    Restart-WebAppPool -Name $AppPoolName

    Write-Host "Successfully recycled Application Pool: $AppPoolName" -ForegroundColor Green

}

catch {

    Write-Host "Failed to recycle Application Pool '$AppPoolName'. Error: $_" -ForegroundColor Red

    exit 1

}

We could run this following manner:

.\Recycle-AppPool.ps1 -AppPoolName "MyAppPool"

One line for each app pool we want to recycle.

But then, when we asked ChatGPT, to give command line for this to run in Windows Task Scheduler, it has provided this:

powershell.exe

-NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "C:\Scripts\Recycle-AppPool.ps1" -AppPoolName "MyAppPool"

However, proactively, it has provided much simpler approach as well. That was the surprise here.

ChatGPT has suggested to use appcmd.exe.

Never heard that before. Then I realized it is a command line utility which get installed when we install IIS stack.

It was much easier to use it (though it had less error handling compared to PowerShell script).

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe

recycle apppool /apppool.name:"MyAppPool"

At the end we choose to use appcmd.exe.

That's something we learned, this week. Thanks ChatGPT.

Using Own API keys in Various IDEs

AI hype is so high these days, every one want best AI models for least cost. Though they don't cost much individually, when you add up cost for each subscription, it is coming to a substantial amount if you very active in AI world.

There fore, I was wondering what kind of support each main AI agent integrated IDE's provide for bringing in you own key (BYOK) - that is your own AI model API key.

Cursor IDE

Cursor allows to bring your own key as of now (Aug/2025). However there are some limitations. As per their website, "Custom API keys only work with standard chat models. Features requiring specialized models (like Tab Completion) will continue using Cursor’s built-in models."

They do support all major model providers (e.g. OpenAI, Google, Claude, Azure, Amazon)

Github Copilot

Github Copilot only support API keys for their organisational clients. You need to buy organisational membership to enable usage of your own API keys.

Here is the link.

Windsurf

Windsurf support BYOK, however, it only support claude models under BYOK settings.

Here is the link.

How to See Which Certificate Was Used in an Existing Backup

Recently I have encountered a interesting scenario relate to SQL server backups.

In our environment there are few SQL servers are running. They are backed up and databases are also backed up. So everything was running smoothly. Until it's not. One of our servers has crashed.

Well, no one was worried, because we had backups and there were not much of data loss.

So after we rebuild the server (we built it from scratch rather than from backups, because we need to refresh the OS anyway), and after installing SQL server, we tried restoring databases.

Then only everyone realized that, backups were encrypted. I know it is our bad, we should have tested restoring periodically, but in small business like us, that never get happen.

So how do we restore the backups. We needed the DEK (Database Encryption Key) which those backups were encrypted.

Luckily we found, set of certificate backups which were use to encrypt database backups.

Every one was happy.

However, how do we know which certificate to use on this particular server. Name didn't really give us a clue.

So we had to Google/Chat with AI a bit.

That's when we came up following approach.

First you need to restore the backup with just header only.

RESTORE HEADERONLY FROM DISK = 'D:\Backups\MyEncryptedBackup.bak';

This will show, result set similar to below:

This result set have following columns (56 of them):

BackupName

BackupDescription

BackupType

ExpirationDate

Compressed

Position

DeviceType

UserName

ServerName

DatabaseName

DatabaseVersion

DatabaseCreationDate

BackupSize

FirstLSN

LastLSN

CheckpointLSN

DatabaseBackupLSN

BackupStartDate

BackupFinishDate

SortOrder

CodePage

UnicodeLocaleId

UnicodeComparisonStyle

CompatibilityLevel

SoftwareVendorId

SoftwareVersionMajor

SoftwareVersionMinor

SoftwareVersionBuild

MachineName

Flags

BindingID

RecoveryForkID

Collation

FamilyGUID

HasBulkLoggedData

IsSnapshot

IsReadOnly

IsSingleUser

HasBackupChecksums

IsDamaged

BeginsLogChain

HasIncompleteMetaData

IsForceOffline

IsCopyOnly

FirstRecoveryForkID

ForkPointLSN

RecoveryModel

DifferentialBaseLSN

DifferentialBaseGUID

BackupTypeDescription

BackupSetGUID

CompressedBackupSize

Containment

KeyAlgorithm

EncryptorThumbprint

EncryptorType

Last two columns, EncryptorThumbprint and EncryptorType will tell you which certificate has been used.

Something I didn't know before.