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Author: Kevin Feasel

Idempotence and Durable Execution

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vanlightly does some thinking:

Determinism is a key concept to understand when writing code using durable execution frameworks such as Temporal, Restate, DBOS, and Resonate. If you read the docs you see that some parts of your code must be deterministic while other parts do not have to be.  This can be confusing to a developer new to these frameworks. 

This post explains why determinism is important and where it is needed and where it is not. Hopefully, you’ll have a better mental model that makes things less confusing.

Some of the examples Jack includes are pretty tricky, showing just how difficult it can be to ensure that multiple, independent systems are all on the same page.

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Generating Exponential Random Numbers in T-SQL

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira generates more artificial data:

Generating random numbers from an exponential distribution is essential for queuing theory, reliability engineering, physics, finance modeling, failure analysis, Poisson process, simulation and Monte Carlo methods, computer graphics, and games. Is it possible to have a Random Exponential Gaussian Numbers function in SQL Server without use of external tools?

As always, I love this series because these examples are complex enough not to be trivial, yet perform well enough to work in real-world environments.

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Tips for the Import Data Option in SQL Server

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword doesn’t trust wizards, with their pointy caps and long beards:

If you need to create a copy of a table in another database, the ‘Import Data’ option may seem convenient. If you’ve used this method to copy to your dev environment and found things break, this post is for you.

Click through for some solid advice on how to import that data. Another thing I would sometimes do is coerce all of the input columns to long strings and load it into a staging table. Then, I could use T-SQL to re-shape the data however I needed it rather than trying to get a finicky SSIS flow to translate this date and time combination (or whatever) appropriately.

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Thoughts on Data Modeling

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones has a two-fer. First up, he asks an opinion question about data modeling:

Recently, I had a few questions on database modeling. One was posted in the SQL Server Central forums, and a customer asked about ERD tooling on the same day. This came shortly after Redgate acquired Vertabelo (now Redgate Data Modeler). This stood out to me as very rarely in the last few years have I found people consulting and updating a diagram while performing database development.

Second, he takes a peek at a tool Redgate purchased:

Redgate acquired a data modeling tool from Vertabelo recently and I wanted to explore how it works. This is a short look at this tool and how it might be useful in working with databases.

My experience with data modeling has been that only the really large companies did a lot of work with upfront data modeling and keeping logical models up to date. It’s still quite useful for data warehouses, and that’s where the people I know who do a lot of data modeling make their living. But I find it’s too much of a hassle in fast-paced environments, especially when I can keep most or all of the data model in my head and I’m the person managing it all.

Essentially, data models are useful to the extent that they’re approximately true. But because they quickly get out of sync with reality, they quickly go from “quite useful” to “dirty lies.”

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Copy Job in Fabric Data Factory Pipelines now GA

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jianlei Shen makes an announcement:

Copy Job Activity allows you to run Copy jobs as native activities inside Data Factory pipelines.

Copy jobs are created and managed independently in Data Factory for quick data movement between supported sources and destinations. With Copy job Activity, that same fast, lightweight experience is now embedded within pipelines, making it easier to automate, schedule, and chain Copy jobs as part of broader data workflows.

Read on for an overview of what’s in the activity and a few links on how to get started with it.

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Row Counts and Execution Time for Active SQL Server Queries

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little wants to know what’s happening right now with this query:

I frequently need to see rowcounts and execution time for queries while they’re running. Maybe I’m troubleshooting a slow query that’s still executing, or I want to understand which operators are causing the slowdown before the query completes.

Last week at the PASS Summit I learned some little nuances about how this works that I’d missed.

Click through to learn what Kendra learned (and now what I learned).

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When Decision Trees Fail

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Ivan Palomares Carrascosa builds an explanation:

In this article, you will learn why decision trees sometimes fail in practice and how to correct the most common issues with simple, effective techniques.

Topics we will cover include:

  • How to spot and reduce overfitting in decision trees.
  • How to recognize and fix underfitting by tuning model capacity.
  • How noisy or redundant features mislead trees and how feature selection helps.

Read on for some of the perils of CART and some ways to resolve them.

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Using the PRODUCT() Function in T-SQL

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta uses a reducer function:

SQL Server 2025 includes new features and enhancements. In the previous SQL Server 2025 tips, we have explored many new features. Have you explored the new Product() function? If not, this will walk you through the Product() function with several examples.

Read on to see how PRODUCT() works and how thoughtful the development team was around supporting window functions as an aggregate function.

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Data Visualization and Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria thinks about notebooks:

Lots of people have created Power BI reports, using interactive data visualizations to explore and communicate data. When Power BI was first created, it was used in situations that weren’t ideal because that was all we had as far as cloud-based tools in the Microsoft data stack. Now, in addition to interactive reports, we have paginated reports and notebooks. In this post, I’ll discuss when notebooks might be an appropriate visualization tool.

Click through for Meagan’s thoughts.

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Extracting SSMS 21 and 22 Saved Connection Data

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea wants to keep some connections:

In this post I demo a PowerShell script that can be used to extract and decrypt SSMS 21 and 22 saved connection information.

This script builds on the one for importing saved connections from SSMS 21 to SSMS 22.
Instead of importing, it looks for any SSMS 21 and 22 related config folders, extracts the relevant connection data, decrypts it and saves it in clear text.

Click through for a link to the script, as well as an explanation of what is happening.

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