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Author: Kevin Feasel

OneLake Diagnostics Immutability Generally Available

Published 2026-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Peplow makes an announcement:

In October 2025, we introduced OneLake diagnostics—a powerful capability that helps teams “answer who accessed what, when, and how” across your Fabric Lakehouse environment. OneLake diagnostics streams JSON-based activity logs into a Lakehouse you choose, enabling rich analysis, governance, and compliance workflows. A powerful capability that helps teams “answer who accessed what, when, and how” across your Fabric Lakehouse environment. OneLake diagnostics streams JSON-based activity logs into a Lakehouse you choose, enabling rich analysis, governance, and compliance workflows.

We are strengthening that foundation with the introduction of immutable diagnostic logs—a new capability that ensures diagnostic events cannot be altered or deleted for a defined retention period, giving you tamper-proof data for the entire lifecycle of your logs.

I do like the idea, but beware the additional costs: immutable also means you can’t delete it later, so 10 years from now, you’re still going to be paying for this diagnostic data.

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Cloud Storage Archival via Parquet Files

Published 2026-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni builds a tool:

What I’m writing about today has nothing to do with analytics, per se. It has everything to do with cloud storage, and the way operations there are priced. Specifically, metadata operations–in the demo code I’ve shared we’re going from five files to one, but you can imagine going from a much larger number of files to much smaller number of files. You may ask–“Joey that sounds dumb, why are you reinventing zip and iso files”. Well, the main reason is that many cloud operations are priced on the number of objects–for example if you had to calculate a checksum across a number of files on S3. (For files/objects that were created before S3 automatically did checksums).

Click through for more information on how it works, as well as a link to the GitHub repo.

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Comparing Direct Lake to Import for Semantic Models

Published 2026-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers puts on the lab coat and safety goggles:

I was recently part of a discussion (which I have heard of multiple times), which was which semantic model to use in Microsoft Fabric.

This was the source for this blog post where I am going to compare Microsoft Direct Lake (DL) to an Import Semantic Model. The goal is to first explain how I set up and configured the comparison.

And in the next blog post I will show the tests and the outcome based on my testing.

This is the first part in a series and covers the setup process for testing. We’ll have to wait until next time for the results.

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A Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Arrays

Published 2026-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Radim Marek talks arrays:

The official documentation provides a good introduction. But beneath this straightforward interface lies a set of more complex properties than most of us realise. Arrays in PostgreSQL are not just “lists” in a field. They have their own memory management strategy, their own index logic, and a lot of edge-case scenarios.

As it goes with boringSQL deep-dives, this article will explore the corners of array functionality that might break your production.

Click through for some not-boring explanation around arrays in PostgreSQL.

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2026 Data Professional Salary Survey Results

Published 2026-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has another year of data:

The results are in! You can download the raw data in Excel for all 10 years and do some slicing and dicing to find out whether you’re underpaid, overpaid, or what it looks like for folks who are out there looking for work.

This year, I added a couple of new items to the survey asking about folks who are unemployed and currently looking for work. In hindsight, I wish I would have done this long ago so that we could have a baseline to know whether things have gotten better or worse. Ah, well – the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second-best time is now. Let’s dig into the data and see what we find.

Click through for Brent’s initial findings and have fun analyzing the data.

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Changing Power BI Dashboard Themes by Toggle

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk demonstrates a process:

In this tutorial, I will recreate a project I built last year: a mini Power BI dashboard with a toggle button to change its appearance. When you toggle the button, the background color changes, the logo and snow switch images are updated, and the visuals are restyled accordingly (including the color of the trees). 

This project combines different tutorials I created in the past, which cover dynamic color changes and the lollipop visual.
At the bottom of this page, you will find a step-by-step video, and you can download the file from the download page.

Click through for instructions, the video, and a zip file to work from.

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Sequence Integer Overflows and BIGINT in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Laurenz Albe performs a migration:

In a previous article, I recommended using bigint for sequence-generated primary keys (but I make an exception for lookup tables!). If you didn’t heed that warning, you might experience integer overflow. That causes downtime and pain. So I thought it would be a good idea to show you how to monitor for the problem and how to keep the worst from happening.

Read on for the downtime-rich solution (thanks to table blocking), as well as a solution that requires less downtime.

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Working with Git in SSMS 22

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Calbimonte answers a question:

In SSMS 22, there is Git integration to manage SQL code versions and repositories. How do you use this functionality?  Can you walk through a step-by-step example?

I’ll admit that I’m not too wild about using Git in SSMS. I don’t have anything against the idea, but I’ve always used separate tools like Visual Studio and VS Code for project and source control management.

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