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Author: Kevin Feasel

Aggregation on a Filtered Range with SUMIFS()

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson uses a DAX function:

Sometimes the columns have shifted, the totals row isn’t showing up, or the colour coding they used last month is gone.

This is not a pivot table problem, pivot tables are excellent tools! The issue is using them for the wrong job.

If you need to explore data – rotating it, slicing it, asking “what does this look like by region?” – pivot tables are unbeatable.

But if you just need a report that always looks the same, month after month, we really recommend SUMIFS.

Click through to see an example of the function in Excel, though it also works the same way in Power BI.

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Finding SQL Agent Jobs that Start Other Jobs

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

David Plaut is looking for the root cause:

A SQL Server Agent job can start other jobs. Writing jobs this way makes it easy to compartmentalize jobs: start a “child” job only when the “parent” reaches a certain step. Finding these steps can be challenging. There is no field or property in sysjobs or its associated tables to help find child jobs.

Imagine this situation: Job B has started, and you don’t know why. You examine Job B, and it has no schedule. What started Job B?

Read on to learn how you can track down jobs that start other jobs, as well as a recursive lineage of who’s starting whom.

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An Overview of Major FabCon Announcements

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven lays out some of the most important changes:

I am sure you have seen, there has been a lot of Fabric and Power BI news lately. Not surprisingly, Fabric Conference was also last week!

I won’t list all the updates here, you can read Arun’s blog, or either of the Fabric or Power BI monthly feature summary blogs to go through the whole list:

Click through for a dozen or so major changes that Nicky highlights.

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Query Folding and Staging in Fabric Dataflows Gen2

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes digging:

A few years ago I wrote this post on the subject of staging in Fabric Dataflows Gen2. In it I explained what staging is, how you can enable it for a query inside a Dataflow, and discussed the pros and cons of using it. However one thing I never got round to doing until this week is looking at how you can tell if query folding is happening on staged data inside a Dataflow – which turns out to be harder to do than you might think.

Read on to learn more, and also check out the comment describing an alternative approach to part of Chris’s solution.

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What’s New with the Fabric SSIS Preview

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard frames the discussion:

The conversation around SSIS is heating up again.

Some see the signals and conclude SSIS is on the way out. Others point to the strength of the ecosystem and say it is far from done. Both perspectives miss something important.

The introduction of Fabric SSIS public preview does not settle the debate. It reframes it.

I see this as another way of saying, “We know you’re still using SSIS packages but we really don’t want to invest in that any longer, so how about you move it into Fabric until you do finally rewrite things as Fabric Data Pipelines?”

That said, Andy lays out where he sees the current landscape and how there are common issues across Microsoft’s ETL/ELT products, mostly in how people use them.

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More Command Line Personalization

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Williams continues to personalize the command line:

In my last post, I customised my Linux command line with 4 dotfiles. Putting the time into finding my way around the command line, and learning Linux commands, becomes more important on a Linux server because there’s no GUI.

I’ll continue tweaking in this post by modernising two classic commands I use daily, and adding two helper packages.

Read on for a few Linux packages that make life easier.

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Third-Party Support for OneLake Security

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill shares some guidance:

As outlined in our technical whitepaper, ‘The future of data security is interoperability‘, permissions that move with data is the future of data security. As modern data lakes are built on open-source technology like Delta and Iceberg, customers expect to use the analytics engines and services that best fit their needs—without copying data or redefining security. This creates a clear requirement: security must be defined once and enforced consistently everywhere data is consumed.

OneLake security now provides API support for third-party enforcement through an authorized engine model. This release extends the same principles used across Microsoft Fabric to external engines and services. OneLake security is now closer to its vision of defined once, enforced everywhere, even beyond first-party workloads.

Click through for more information.

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Protecting TDE-Enabled Databases

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias answers a question:

I have gotten a lot of email questions recently about TDE and SQL Server, specifically around the encryption hierarchy involved in protecting the encrypted data inside of a TDE enabled database in SQL Server. So, rather than continuing to write long emails that explain this fully, I figured this would be a great blog post topic for future reference as a way to reboot getting back to posting content more regularly on my blog. For an overview of TDE in SQL Server see the following topic in the Books Online (Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn).

Click through to learn more about how SQL Server works with the in-built encryption system for TDE and what you need to back up in order to ensure you can correct anything that might go wrong.

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Maps in Microsoft Fabric now GA

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Johannes Kebeck makes an announcement:

When we envisioned Maps in Microsoft Fabric, our goal was to empower any data citizen to analyze data in time and space without any specialized knowledge. Introduced in preview at FabCon Europe 2025, it has since been used by customers across industries creating and sharing map-centric applications. Additional features were added at Ignite 2025, and this week at FabCon Atlanta, Maps in Microsoft Fabric is generally available – along with new capabilities that expand how geospatial data can be modeled, visualized, and operationalized at any scale.

Read on to see what’s new in maps.

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