A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
kamurray has a big list of updates:
This month’s update brings a broad set of new capabilities across Microsoft Fabric, spanning the platform experience, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence. Read on to learn about improvements to the Fabric experience, deeper VS Code integration, enhanced notebook resiliency, expanded machine learning and governance features, and new real-time data processing capabilities.
Click through to see what’s new.
Leave a CommentI do absolutely consult for software vendors. I used to work for Quest Software, and I’ve consulted for Amazon, Google, and a lot of third party software vendors. It’s real work that requires real effort on my part, and I need to get paid for that.
Having said that, I still wanna help you for free, so I’ve put together this blog post with my favorite advice for software makers. There’s a lot of hard-learned lessons in here, and I hope you can just read ’em and avoid some of the most common pitfalls that folks run into.
As one of the few people in the SQL Server community who’s good at marketing, Brent’s advice is worth a careful read.
1 CommentNicky van Vroenhoven gives the standard consulting answer:
I think I have gotten this question at least five or six times in the last few months, and with Translytical Task Flows reaching GA in the March 2026 Power BI update, I expect it to come up even more. So let me write it down once and for all.
The question usually sounds something like: “We want users to be able to add comments or update values in their Power BI report. Should we use Power Apps or this new Translytical Task Flows thing?”
My honest answer is: it depends 😆, but the decision is simpler than you might think.
Click through for the decision criteria.
Leave a CommentAndreas Wolter sees a cache invalidation issue:
When identity or permission boundaries behave inconsistently – even under specific lifecycle conditions – that is more than a product bug. It becomes a security-relevant design issue, because security depends not just on how access is granted, but also on how reliably it is revoked.
While investigating the new permission model introduced alongside SQL Server 2025’s AI integration and vector search capabilities (Article: New Permissions in SQL Server 2025), I encountered a case where EXTERNAL MODEL permissions can persist after a user is dropped, creating stale authorization state.
Click through to learn more about this issue and what it means.
Leave a CommentMeagan Longoria wants information:
Materialized lake views (MLVs) in Microsoft Fabric are an effective way to implement medallion architecture declaratively, but once you have a pipeline of MLVs in production, you need visibility into whether they’re current. Fabric’s MLV management area gives you a visual lineage and refresh history, but if you want to build automated alerting, logging, or custom tooling, you need to get that information programmatically. This post walks through one way to do that, using a small demo lakehouse built entirely in a Fabric notebook.
Click through for that demonstration.
Leave a CommentGuillaume Pressiat shows off logrittr:
In SAS, every DATA step prints a log:
NOTE: There were 120000 observations read from WORK.SALES. NOTE: 7153 observations were deleted. NOTE: The data set WORK.RESULT has 112847 observations and 11 variables.R’s
dplyrpipelines are silent.logrittrfills that gap with%>=%, a drop-in pipe that logs row counts, column counts, added/dropped columns, and timing at every step, with no function masking.
Click through to see how logrittr helps. Back when I was using R heavily, I would have really enjoyed this package. H/T R-Bloggers.
Eduardo Pivaral searches for expensive queries:
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying the most expensive queries is crucial to optimize resource usage and improve overall system efficiency.
My immediate answer was “all of them,” though in fairness, I’ve primarily needed to deal with situations in which people set up Redshift without using Kimball-style modeling and queried with (essentially) SELECT *.
Leave a CommentRobin Moffatt digs into a neat feature in Apache Flink:
Flink added support for what it calls Materialized Tables in 1.20, released in 2024. You can read about the design and motivations in FLIP-435. In a nutshell, Materialized Tables provide a way to include the SQL to populate and refresh a table as part of its definition.
Let’s take a look!
Robin takes a deep dive into it, figures out several issues you might run into along the way, and provides a verdict at the end of the post. In addition, the GitHub repo includes a Docker Compose file you can use to follow along.
Leave a CommentTemidayo Omoniyi sends an e-mail:
Have you ever waited for an eternity, waiting for either a query or SQL Agent Jobs to run? This is something most Data Warehouse Developers face daily.
Click through to see how you can use database mail to track long-running tasks. My primary hang-up with solutions like this is, what are you going to do about the e-mail? If there is no concrete action you can take, the most likely outcome will be to ignore the e-mail. This makes it harder to sift out the true positive you need to look into versus the false positives that happen every day.
Leave a CommentSimple Talk’s editor digs into the data:
Leading research and analysis firm Gartner recently revealed its DBMS Market Share Ranks for the 2011-2025 period, and it shows a clear pattern. That is: while the dominant database vendors are losing their stranglehold on the market, it’s happening very slowly – so don’t expect to see big changes at the top any time soon.
It’s a trend already uncovered in the Redgate DB-Engines rankings in recent times, despite it using a very different set of metrics compared to Gartner’s analysis.
I had no idea that Redgate owned DB-Engines. But there’s some interesting information to come out of these results, especially because they come at the problem from very different angles.
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