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Author: Kevin Feasel

Maestro Now 1.1.0

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Will Hipson lays out an update:

maestro has officially graduated to stable release with version 1.0.0 back in January 2026 and now its latest version 1.1.0. This marks a commitment to maintaining a stable API and increased reliance on using maestro in production. In our environment alone, maestro has orchestrated millions of pipeline executions over the course of a year, effectively making it the heartbeat of our entire data stack.

If you haven’t heard of maestro, it’s a pipeline orchestration package. You can learn more about it here.

Click through to see what’s changed between the 1.0.0 release and now. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Using Change Event Streaming for Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Analytics

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Xu Jiang and Nikola Zagorac take a look at Change Event Streaming:

Traditionally, Change Data Capture (CDC) has been the go-to mechanism for tracking SQL Server data changes. However, CDC relies on polling-based capture with intermediate change tables, introducing latency and operational overhead, such as managing polling, offsets, and replaying windows in connector. Change Event Streaming (CES), introduced in SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance, takes a fundamentally different approach: it pushes data change events directly from the database engine to external streaming platforms in real time. Built on the CloudEvents specification, CES delivers structured JSON messages with the operation type and full row data – eliminating intermediate tables and reducing end-to-end latency to near zero.

Click through for more information, though Change Event Streaming is still officially a preview feature in SQL Server 2025

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Zero-Shot Text Classification in Python

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Abid Ali Awan doesn’t have time to train:

In this article, you will learn how zero-shot text classification works and how to apply it using a pretrained transformer model.

Topics we will cover include:

  • The core idea behind zero-shot classification and how it reframes labeling as a reasoning task.
  • How to use a pretrained model to classify text without task-specific training data.
  • Practical techniques such as multi-label classification and hypothesis template tuning.

This typically works best when the set of classes is quite distinct and limited in number. Once you get past several classes, the likelihood of spurious results increases considerably and that’s when you’re back to model training/fine-tuning based off of sufficient quantities of labeled data.

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Using the Dedicated Admin Connection in SQL Server

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley forces down the door:

It’s 2 AM. Your phone is going off. Users can’t connect to the application, and when you open SSMS to investigate, the connection spinner just keeps spinning. SQL Server is alive; you can see the process running, but it’s too overwhelmed to let you in. You need to get in there and kill something, but you can’t get a connection to do it. This is exactly the scenario the Dedicated Admin Connection DAC was built for. And if you haven’t set it up yet, now is the time. Because when you need it, you really need it.

Because there is a preparatory step, it’s important to run that while the instance is in a healthy state. That way, it’ll be available to you when the instance is at the edge of failure.

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SQL ConstantCare Report for Spring 2026

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar provides an update:

SQL Server 2025’s 1% adoption rate might sound small, but it mirrors the adoption rate curves of 2019 and 2022 when those releases came out. It took 2019 a year to break 10% adoption, and it took 2022 a year and a half. I’ve grouped together 2014 & prior versions because they’re all unsupported, and 2016 will join them quickly in July when it goes out of extended support. (I can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years already!) Here’s how adoption is trending over time, with the most recent data at the right:

Standard statements about how this is a biased (in the statistical sense) sample apply. Standard statements about how I am appreciative that Brent shares this information because I don’t know of anyone else who consistently does give out this level of info also apply.

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What’s New in Kafka 4.1.0

Published 2026-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Brebner has a list:

Since then, Kafka 4.1.0 was released (September 2025, see detailed release notes), with around 472 Kafka Improvement (KIPs), including new features, improvements, bug fixes, tests, and more—well done to the Apache Kafka open source community! Kafka 4.1.1 (a bugfix release) was made available on the NetApp Instaclustr Managed Platform in December 2025.

So, what’s changed from 4.0 to 4.1.0? What are the most interesting improvements (for me at least)? In this blog, we focus on a new improvement, the Streams Rebalance Protocol.

Click through for that list.

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The Power of Database Projects

Published 2026-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword is sold:

If you’ve been using Database Projects for simply maintaining copies of your database objects – like I used to – then you’ve been missing out on the power of its deployments. Initially I was sceptical about how it could effectively perform upgrades but after seeing them land in SSMS last month I wanted to revisit them as a means of actual deployment.

My scepticism was completely misplaced, so if you haven’t touched Database Projects before – or had similar concerns as me – I want to demonstrate 3 features which make them not just good, but amazing for deployments.

Click through for those features. I will say that for straightforward databases, the database project deployment process is pretty good. Where it falls apart is when you have a large number of cross-database dependencies, especially if there are mutual cross-database dependencies: DB1.dbo.sp1 needs DB2.dbo.Table2, and DB2.dbo.view2 references DB1.dbo.Table1. In that case, the workaround is so annoying and essentially comes down to “have three separate database projects, one for DB1, one for DB2, and one for a scalled-down version of DB1/DB2 without the dependencies, and then use that to inject into the other DB.” Which does kind of work, yeah, but now you’re maintaining even more. And once you get to dozens of dependencies and lots of cross-database queries? Yeah, forget about it.

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Bug in sys.dm_exec_query_plan_stats

Published 2026-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar finds a bug:

When you turn on last actual plans in SQL Server 2019 and newer:

ALTER DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION SET LAST_QUERY_PLAN_STATS = ON;

The system function sys.dm_exec_query_plan_stats is supposed to show you the last actual query plan for a query. I’ve had really hit-or-miss luck with this thing, but my latest struggle with it is that two of the numbers are flat out wrong. It mixes up CPU time and elapsed time.

Here’s a simple query to prove it:

Click through for a demonstration of the bug.

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An Overview of pg_plan_advice

Published 2026-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Christophe Pettus continues a series on plan hints in Postgres:

Robert Haas’s pg_plan_advice patch set, proposed for PostgreSQL 19, is where the twenty-year argument from Part 2 has landed — or is trying to. It is not pg_hint_plan brought into core. It is a different thing, with different mechanics, a different scope, and a different answer to the “why is this different from Oracle-style hints” question.

Read on to learn more about the proposal and how this resolves some of the core issues that led the major Postgres maintainers to reject query hints for so long.

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Microsoft Fabric Eventstream Network Security Features

Published 2026-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Lin looks at network security features:

Eventstream in Fabric Real-Time Intelligence stream data from both inside and outside the Fabric platform. When your external sources sit behind firewalls or in private networks, choosing the right network security feature is essential. This post breaks down the available options in Eventstream and helps you determine which one fits your scenario.

Click through for more information.

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