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Author: Kevin Feasel

The Analyst Engineer Role in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley describes a job role:

Analytics Engineer – The DP-600 exam contains elements of both data analytics and data engineering with a business focus. It is the fence-sitter between the disciplined worlds of data engineering and the abstract creativity of analytics. An Analytics Engineer bridges data engineering and analytics by building enterprise-ready solutions in Microsoft Fabric. Combines skills in SQL, DAX, and KQL with expertise in data modeling and performance optimization. They design and manage dataflows, create semantic models, optimize datasets, and ensure governance to deliver curated, analytics-ready data assets for reporting and analysis.

Read on to see how this role fits and some of the things a person performing this role should know and be able to do.

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Dealing with a Full Transaction Log

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis performs some troubleshooting:

It’s 2am. Your phone wakes you. Rub your eyes, check your email, and there it is:

Error: 9002, Severity: 17, State: 4
The transaction log for database 'trading' is full due to 'LOG_BACKUP'.

The database is still online. Looks ok. You can read from it. But every INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE fails. Production night-trading is effectively down.

The good news: It’s fixable — but, that fix depends entirely on what’s preventing log truncation.

Click through for a choose-your-own-adventure story.

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Thoughts on On-Disk Rowstore in SQL Server

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis starts a series on storage structures:

When a query is slow, it is often caused by inefficient access to the data. So our tuning work very frequently comes down to figuring out how data was read, and then massaging our queries or database structures to get SQL Server to access the data in a more efficient way.

So we look at scans, seeks, and lookups. We know that scans are good when we access most of the data. Or, in the case of an ordered scan, to prevent having to sort the data. We know that seeks are preferred when there is a filter in the query. And we know that lookups represent a good tradeoff between better performance and too many indexes, but only if the filter is highly selective.

All of the above is true. And all of it is highly generalized. And hence, often, not true enough to be actually useful.

Read on for an overview of the most common option.

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Security and High Availability Checklist for Database Application Vendors

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Wolter has a new version of a checklist:

As a database application vendor, the security and reliability of your software are key competitive differentiators. As a Database Administrator, your priority is ensuring that hosted databases do not expose data or the environment to risk. To support this, we have developed a checklist designed as a blueprint for building secure-by-default, resilient data applications. Following this guidance not only helps you align with ISO 27001 controls but also ensures that your customers can trust your product against the backdrop of a demanding enterprise environment and an evolving threat landscape.

Click through for the list, as well as a PDF version of it. I had a couple of quibbles in my immediate reaction (especially avoiding CLR and triggers), but in fairness, as I thought about whether I’d trust rando vendor XYZ to get it right, I decided that this is good advice.

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Defining Applications in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword deploys an app:

When using Power BI or Fabric workspaces to browse reports, we’re greeted with a list of items and their attributes. While attention is given to report visuals such as bars, pies, candles, and RAG highlights, the surrounding experience is neglected. When it comes to consumption, the standard interface falls short.

Apps fill this gap. They’ve been around in Power BI for a while, but with the additional layers that come with Fabric, the need for a clean way to present content is increasingly valuable.

Read on to learn about more functionality around apps and how you can set them up in Fabric/Power BI.

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Thoughts on the Death of the DBA

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis presses X to doubt:

Every few years, something comes along that’s definitively, no-questions-asked going to replace us.

Let’s review the historical record.

Rebecca points out a half-dozen instances in which people have decried the end of the DBA role, and yet it’s still there somehow… And honestly, you could probably find a half-dozen more examples without searching too hard, like how SQL Server 2000 was going to render DBAs obsolete because of its self-management capabilities. Which, admittedly, is very similar to the 1996 Oracle announcement.

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MinIO Alternatives

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Robin Moffatt looks for alternatives:

In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility.

In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO.

Read on for Robin’s analysis of a half-dozen alternatives.

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Lessons Learned in a SQL Server 2025 Upgrade

Published 2026-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand shares some lessons learned:

We recently upgraded multiple systems to SQL Server 2025. The engine upgrade itself was smooth, but three unexpected issues surfaced in our lower environments as we planned out production. None of these issues prevented the upgrade from completing, but all three could easily derail an otherwise smooth in-place upgrade to SQL Server 2025. What were these issues, and how can you avoid hitting them?

My biggest surprise out of this is that full-text search actually got upgraded.

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