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Author: Kevin Feasel

Working with Headers in Paginated Reports

Published 2026-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword just wnats things to line up correctly:

If you’ve tried to get header rows to repeat or scroll as you move through your paginated reports, you may have felt the frustration of getting them working correctly. Whether it’s Reporting Services, Power BI, or Fabric, the flavour doesn’t matter.

The properties on the tablix should provide the functionality, but they’re not reliable. In this post we’ll look at how to achieve the repetition and scrolling behaviour that will work consistently.

Read on to re-experience one of the more annoying pain points around SQL Server Reporting Services and now Power BI paginated reports.

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Deciding Whether to Use Clustering or Availability Groups

Published 2026-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar has a take:

Sandra Delany (LinkedIn) wrote a well-thought-out blog post called, “Should a SQL Server DBA Know Windows Clustering?” She’s got about 20 years of DBA experience, and she works for Straight Path (a firm I respect) as a consultant. You can probably guess based on her background that yes, she believes you should know how to set up, configure, and troubleshoot Windows clustering. It’s a good post, and you should read it.

But… I don’t agree.

Read on for Brent’s opinion. I do agree that there are companies that don’t need high availability, and that there are plenty of problems you can run into if you don’t understand how it all works. I also think that, if you’re a DBA responsible for maintaining servers, and your company isn’t using any kind of high availability option, it’s important at least to learn how the mechanisms work so that, if HA does become important, you aren’t pushing back because of ignorance in the product.

But on the flip side, where does that rank in importance? It’s probably closer to the middle (or lower) than the top of the list. And I definitely agree that disaster recovery is generally the more important of the two if you can only have one. But even there, we have exceptions in things like stock trading systems or data warehouses, where you can rebuild the system from external sources.

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SQL Server and January 2026 Patch Tuesday

Published 2026-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis takes a look at a recent security vulnerability:

Microsoft’s January 2026 Patch Tuesday included a security fix for SQL Server: CVE-2026-20803, an elevation of privilege vulnerability with CVSS score 7.2 (Important).

The vulnerability is classified as CWE-306: Missing Authentication for Critical Function. An attacker who already has high-level privileges on the SQL Server instance could exploit this flaw to escalate further — gaining debugging privileges, dumping system memory, and potentially extracting sensitive data or credentials.

Read on for more information about the CVE, what it requires to exploit, and how you can patch SQL Server to prevent it from being an issue. It’s interesting that this only affects SQL Server 2022 and 2025.

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Table Statistics and Planning Slowdowns

Published 2026-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Andrei Lepikhov digs into a performance issue:

A query executes in just 2 milliseconds, yet its planning phase takes 500 ms. The database is reasonably sized, the query involves 9 tables, and the default_statistics_target is set to only 500. Where does this discrepancy come from?

This question was recently raised on the pgsql-performance mailing list, and the investigation revealed a somewhat surprising culprit: the column statistics stored in PostgreSQL’s pg_statistic table.

Read on for Andrei’s analysis and some interesting thoughts on possible avenues for improvement.

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Performance Testing Sequential Number Generation

Published 2026-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson breaks out the stopwatch:

I have read so much lately about how bad it is to use a recursive CTE to do… well pretty much anything. It came up in a discussion about creating sequential number, and not in a positive sort of way.

I wrote about recursive CTEs when they were first added to SQL Server, and have been a fan for doing breadth-first searching of a hierarchy/graph, but never even thought to use one to generate a set of numbers. As I kept hearing how bad it this method was, so I figured, let’s see just how terrible it is. And of course, I needed something to compare to, so I decided to try all of the ways I could think of. So I will generate varying numbers of rows with the following methods:

Read on for the list of competitors and how they did.

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Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Lunn digs into a somewhat-new feature:

So first off, what are they? They are basically a table object that is based on a query. (Yes I know they are called ‘Views’… more on that later) So like a view, it is defined by a SQL query, but it doesn’t just sit over tables and runs that SQL when you query that view. What it does do is take the ‘View’ SQL query that defines the Materialised Lake Views, runs it and stores the query result data into a delta table. So when you query that view, you get the data from that object, and not the underlying tables. Neat! Save a bit on computing query time!

Read on to learn more about what they are, how they work, and when they can be useful.

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Setting up Azure SQL Mirroring to Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt troubleshoots an issue:

When setting up database mirroring from Azure SQL to Microsoft Fabric for one of my demo databases, I ran into an issue while trying to connect to my Azure SQL database.

As you can see in the screenshot above, it seems that a setting on my logical SQL Server in Azure is misconfigured. Let’s resolve that in a couple of steps.

Click through for the screenshot, the specific error, and how Olivier was able to get things working.

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The Complexity of Cloud Security

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis shares a tale of woe:

Cloud-based SQL Server security isn’t simpler. It’s different — and the learning curve is brutal if you grew up on-prem.

If you’ve spent years working Windows authentication, SQL logins, role memberships, and the occasional certificate, you may assume cloud security is more of that, just with a portal. Not. The SQL Server/Cloud permission models are layered differently, the terminology shifts depending on the platform, and the people who ‘own’ security are spread across teams that don’t always speak the same language.

Read on for an example of the kinds of challenges you can run into. Adding to that complexities around managed identities and authorization mechanisms and things can get very convoluted, even when the intent is to simplify matters.

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T-SQL Tuesday 194 Round-Up

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson has made a big mistake:

As I sit here, preparing to write my roundup post, I have not read anyone else’s post yet. I thought it would be good to introduce the idea first, recap to the other posts, then mine. I won’t share any detail of the mistake I shared, but I do want to mention something I included in my post. Types of mistakes. Mistakes of choice, and mistakes of accidents.

Read on for a nice round-up of a popular topic.

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Workspace-Level Surge Protection Controls in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Pankaj Arora announces a new preview feature:

Until now, surge protection applied only at the capacity level—meaning all workspaces shared the same rules.

What’s new: workspace-level surge protection

We’re taking surge protection to the next level with workspace-level controls. This update gives you more granular management of compute usage across your organization.

Read on to see what this means for organizations using Microsoft Fabric.

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