Administration – Curated SQL

Connection Pooling in PostgreSQL vs SQL Server

Published 2026-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

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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Optimizing Planned Availability Group Failover in SQL Server

Published 2026-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand shares some advice:

Shaving even a handful of seconds from the process can improve the application and end user experience; it can also drastically reduce alert noise or, at least, how long alerts have to stay muted. There’s a lot of material out there about performing AG failovers correctly (no data loss), but far less that focuses on shortening the disruption window. The difference is usually some combination of redo volume, checkpoint behavior, open transactions, and secondary readiness.

I wanted to share some techniques I use to make planned failovers faster and more predictable. Some of these techniques are well documented, while others come from real-world patterns I’ve observed across many SQL Server environments. I’ll talk about what I do before, during, and after the failover to minimize disruption and increase the chance that end users are oblivious that anything happened.

Aaron provides several tips to help reduce the pain of failover.

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Code Pages in PostgreSQL on Windows

Published 2026-02-18 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman tells a story:

Running PostgreSQL on Windows feels deceptively simple for anyone with a Windows laptop that just wants a local database to test or demo on. Just a few clicks and I’ve installed it, started the service, open psql and I’m up and running. Except… not quite. Because if you’ve ever seen this message:
Console code page set to 1252 for psql compatibility
You’ve stepped into one of the more subtle, frustrating challenges of running PostgreSQL on Windows. So, let’s talk about why this happens, what it is and why it matters more than you might think…

This has several downstream problems, as Kellyn points out. Read on to see how you can fix the issue.

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Starting an Expired SQL Server VM

Published 2026-02-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Douglas ran out the clock:

My preview trial of 2025 was evaluation version, and if you let that run past 180 days your SQL instance just will not start. I had an old Azure VM that I fired up to grab some code from a SQL Agent job I had been playing with and hit exactly this problem. Here’s the workaround:

Click through for the process. Fortunately, Rob doesn’t stop at how to get the instance up again, but continues into installing a non-evaluation version.

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Monitoring Query Plan Utilization in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-02-10 by Kevin Feasel

Ahmed Gouda shows how to use pgwatch to track query plan utilization:

The PostgreSQL ecosystem just introduced a new pg_stat_plans extension. It’s similar to pg_stat_statements but it tracks aggregated statistics for query plans instead of SQL statements.

It exposes a SQL interface to query those statistics via the pg_stat_plans view, and in this post, I will explore how easy it is to integrate such extensions with pgwatch for those who want to improve/customize the metrics gathered from a monitored database.

Click through for the demo.

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Migrating from a Contained Availability Group

Published 2026-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Warren Departee undoes a problem:

A client was running a Contained Availability Group in SQL Server 2022, but wasn’t using the AG Listener for their application connections. This negated most of the benefits the Contained AG was designed to provide. They also had some security misunderstandings and missteps, as this was built for them without any real knowledge transfer – one of the reasons they reached out to us for help. After review, it became clear that there was no need for a contained AG here, so we helped them migrate to a Basic Availability Group (SQL Server Availability Group in SQL Server Standard Edition) while preserving their database configurations and minimizing downtime.

Read on for a step-by-step process and a few hints on configuration.

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Thoughts on Creating Databases in Contained Availability Groups

Published 2026-02-09 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Wolter digs into some updated functionality:

First of all: It’s always encouraging to see the Product team act on user feedback. SQL Server 2025 CU1 introduces an improvement that allows the creation and restoration of databases within contained availability groups (CAG). This is a step in the right direction, but as you’ll see, there are still some bumps to smooth out. Keep the feedback coming (here: Allow creation and restore of databases in contained availability group) — progress is happening, but we’re not quite there yet.

Read on for a litany of issues, as well as Andreas’s recommended solutions.

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Install and Configure SSIS 2025

Published 2026-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck performs an installation:

We’re an on-premises shop running all our services on our own machines. We’re planning to migrate to SQL Server 2025 and there are some older SSIS projects we might need. Is SQL Server Integration Services still supported in SQL Server 2025? If yes, how can we install it on our server? Do we still need Visual Studio to develop projects and packages, and how can we convert the older projects?

Granted, SSIS hasn’t exactly changed a lot with SQL Server 2025, but it’s there for you.

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Category: Administration