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Category: Administration

Major Security Update for SQL Server

Published 2026-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis digs into an important patch:

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, and this month we’ve got a good one. CVE-2026-21262 was already publicly disclosed before Microsoft shipped the fix – and it lets an authenticated SQL Server user escalate straight to sysadmin. SQL Server 2016 through 2025, Windows and Linux. No physical access required. No user interaction required. Just a valid login and a network path to your instance. Go patch!

If you’re a SQL Server DBA or consultant and you’re reading this before patching, stop reading and go patch.

Read on for more information about the vulnerability and how to make sure you’re on the latest CU or GDR for SQL Server.

Also, the fact that there are fixes going back to 2016 doesn’t mean that 2014 and earlier are fine. It just means that Microsoft is serious about not patching versions 10+ years out of date.

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What’s New for tempdb in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Johan Deardurff lists the updates:

TempDB has consistently been regarded as one of the most essential and, historically, overlooked components within SQL Server. When TempDB goes wrong, it rarely fails quietly. A single runaway query, poorly designed report, or unexpected workload spike can consume TempDB space and bring an entire instance to its knees.

With SQL Server 2025, Microsoft has made meaningful investments to change that story. TempDB is no longer just something you monitor and hope behaves; it’s now something you can govern, recover quickly from, and observe with far greater clarity.

Click through for a breakdown of how Microsoft has tackled some classic tempdb problems in SQL Server 2025.

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The Transaction Log as a Circle

Published 2026-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal explains to the officer that the transaction log is a flat circle:

In the second part of this series, I described the structural hierarchy of the transaction log. As this post is chiefly concerned with the Virtual Log Files (VLFs) I described, I recommend you read the second part before continuing.

When all is well, the transaction log will endlessly loop, reusing the existing VLFs. This behavior is what I call the circular nature of the log. Sometimes, however, something will happen to prevent this, and the transaction log grows and grows, adding more and more VLFs. In this post, I’ll explain how all this works, or sometimes doesn’t.

Read on for a depiction of the transaction log and what can cause it to foul up.

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Avoid Hard-Coding Linked Server Names

Published 2026-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low provides some good advice:

I’m not a great fan of linked servers in SQL Server but they are often necessary. If I’m working with the latest version of SQL Server, I really prefer to use External Data Sources and External Tables. But not everyone is on the latest version. In the meantime, what I see all the time, is people hardcoding server names like this:

SDUPROD2022.WWIDB.Payroll.Employees

That makes your code really hard to manage.

Read on for several options. At a prior company quite a while ago, we went with DNS entries and they worked reasonably well.

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Alerting People in Microsoft Teams from Data Factory Pipelines

Published 2026-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword sends a message:

Whether running Data Factory, Synapse, or Fabric pipelines, things go wrong – and the de facto response is to send an email. We’ve looked at sending emails from pipelines before, but at scale they can become noise and are easy to ignore.

A more effective option is to surface alerts where collaboration already exists, such as Teams.

In this post we’re going to start looking at using Teams and consolidate notifications into a channel. This functionality gives team members visibility, the ability to update in threads, and the option to tag people for a tighter response loop than typical emails bring.

Click through for the process.

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Getting Help in MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series on the Microsoft Fabric management Powershell module:

Most of this blog post is going to be more about PowerShell in general than this specific module. The MicrosoftFabricMgmt module has over 295 cmdlets, which can be overwhelming at first glance. But PowerShell’s built-in discovery tools make it easy to find what you need. Knowing how to use a command is always available in the shell itself. You can find out how to use a function, what parameters it takes, and see examples of its usage without ever leaving the command line.

I have been using PowerShell for over a decade, and I still rely heavily on Get-Command and Get-Help to explore new modules and refresh my memory on ones I haven’t used in a while. In this post, I’ll show you how to use these tools effectively to navigate the MicrosoftFabricMgmt module.

Read on to see how you can get help. At least, on that front.

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Fast Failover in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff lays out some changes in SQL Server 2025:

A client requested a presentation discussing key improvements to Always On Availability Group fast failover in SQL Server 2025. I decided that a summary would be appropriate for a blog post. So, here I discuss Enhanced Telemetry, Persistent Health, and Intelligent Fast Failover 

John has a very positive take on fast failover. I haven’t tried any of this functionality, but some of this does sound promising.

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Connection Pooling in PostgreSQL vs SQL Server

Published 2026-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Haripriya Naidu compares two systems:

If you speak SQL Server as your first language, then you might be aware that connections are thread-based by design. That means each session/connection in SQL Server gets a worker thread. That thread is tied to that session from start to finish of execution.
If there are no available threads, new connections wait in queue until threads become available. This is called a thread-based model.

Postgres is different, it uses a process-based model. Every single connection spawns a separate backend OS process and each of it consumes RAM (>5MB per connection).

It’s interesting that the RDBMS that really “needs” connection pooling doesn’t have it built in, whereas the one that doesn’t “need” connection pooling (but can still benefit greatly from it) does.

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Workspace Operations with MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series:

The workspace is the fundamental unit of organisation in Microsoft Fabric. Everything lives inside a workspace — your lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, pipelines, reports. Managing workspaces is therefore the first practical skill to build, and MicrosoftFabricMgmt makes it straightforward.

Read on for examples covering how to create, update, list, retrieve, or remove workspaces.

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An Introduction to MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell has a series of posts on MicrosoftFabricMgmt. The first post provides an introduction:

I have been introducing the Microsoft fabric-toolbox — covering the toolbox itself, FUAM, and FCA. All excellent tools. But there is one item in the toolbox that I have been personally involved in building, and it is the one I am most excited to write about.

Today I am kicking off a series of posts about MicrosoftFabricMgmt — an enterprise-grade PowerShell module that gives you comprehensive, scriptable control over the entire Microsoft Fabric REST API. It is hosted as part of the fabric-toolbox on GitHub.

The second post covers installation and authentication:

Yesterday I introduced the MicrosoftFabricMgmt module and explained what it can do. Today we are getting hands on — installing the module, sorting out dependencies, and making your first connection to Microsoft Fabric.

By the end of this post you will have the module installed, be authenticated, and have your first list of Fabric workspaces in your terminal.

The third post involves not having to deal with a bunch of GUIDs:

Which workspace is 948d3445-54a5-4c2a-85e7-2c3d30933992? Which capacity? Who knows — go look it up. Multiply that by fifty items across ten workspaces and you have a frustrating afternoon ahead of you.

The PowerShell Module**MicrosoftFabricMgmt** solves some of this frustration.

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