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Category: Tools

An Overview of the FabricTools Powershell Module

Published 2025-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Kamil Nowinski provides an overview of the FabricTools Powershell module:

Managing Microsoft Fabric at scale quickly becomes painful if you rely only on the UI. Workspaces, capacities, and tenant-level settings all need repeatable, scriptable management. FabricTools is a community-driven PowerShell module that fills this gap by adding high‑level cmdlets focused on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI administration.​

In this post, you will learn what FabricTools is, how to install it from the PowerShell Gallery, and how to list all Fabric workspaces and export them to a CSV file for further analysis.

I was going to say “It looks a lot like DBATools” and then I realized that several of the contributors are DBATools mainstays, so that makes sense.

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Query Estimates and Tooling in Oracle

Published 2025-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

David Fitzjarrell lays out a comparison:

Depending upon which tool is used query plans can change. There are two provided by Oracle, SQL*Plus and SQL Developer, and how they treat bind variables can alter execution plans. Let’s look into that and see what may be the cause.

SQL*Plus has been around for quite a while and is a very mature product. SQL Developer also has a long history, not quire as long as SQL*Plus but is well beyond the early phases of development. Both are excellent tools, returning reliable and repeatable results, but SQL Developer may take some liberties SQL*Plus doesn’t, especially where bind variables are involved. SQL*Plus and PL/SQL allow the developer to define data types for bind variables, and will pass those values through unchanged. SQL Developer, however, appears to pass such values using a character data type regardless whether the value is a string or numeric, allowing Oracle to ‘decide’ how to optimize the query. This can produce sometimes ‘unexplained’ results with estimates and execution plans.

Read on for an example in which the choice of tool can add a considerable percentage to the expected length of the query. The tricky part here is that this doesn’t mean the query actually takes longer, but that expectations will differ.

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Exploring Associations in R with AssociationExplorer

Published 2025-12-17 by Kevin Feasel

Antoine Soetewey announces a new tool:

I am pleased to announce the publication of our paper “AssociationExplorer: A user-friendly Shiny application for exploring associations and visual patterns” in the journal SoftwareX, together with the official release of the AssociationExplorer2 R package on CRAN.

Both the paper and the software are part of an open-science effort aimed at making exploratory data analysis more accessible to non-technical users.

Read on to learn more about the tool and how you can get it. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Monitoring Replication in Redgate Monitor

Published 2025-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shows off some functionality:

The monitoring capabilities in Redgate Monitor were originally fairly limited to a few counters from PerfMon. A few people had written custom metrics on sqlmonitormetrics.com that clients could use, but we’ve had customers asking for more native integrations.

We’ve done it. With version 14.2, we have added an estate view of your replication environment. In the Estate menu, there is a new entry for Replication Monitoring.

I had to check the documentation to see if merge replication was included, and it was. That’s usually the form that people avoid because it’s too hard to implement.

In practice, this doesn’t replace ReplMon or more detailed mechanisms for detailing system behavior, but it does at least provide the ability to alert if things are going wrong with the SQL Agent jobs. That probably catches about 60-70% of issues with replication, with the remaining 30-40% requiring some sort of time of flight indicator to see if data on the subscribers are keeping up to date with data on the publisher.

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Accessing REST APIs from SQL Server

Published 2025-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand calls an API:

If you’ve worked with SQL Server as long as I have, you’ve surely seen this type of request float to your inbox: “Can’t we just call {some API} from SQL Server?“

Setting aside the instinctive “no,” how have we actually handled this over the years? Are we any better off with the new solution offered in SQL Server 2025 (sys.sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, already described in this tip by Hristo Hristov: Invoke REST API Endpoint from SQL Server 2025)?

Read on for a quick history and some thoughts on invoking REST APIs from Azure SQL Database.

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Reverse Engineering a Physical Model Diagram with Redgate Data Modeler

Published 2025-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones gives the new Regate acquisition a try:

I recently wrote about a logical diagram with Redgate Data Modeler. That was interesting, but creating all the objects is a pain. I decided to try creating a physical diagram from an existing database. This post looks at the experience.

Click through for Steve’s thoughts. I appreciate how he’s willing to call out the pain points that exist in the product today.

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Running SQL Server on KubeVirt

Published 2025-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski builds a virtual machine:

With all the changes that have happened with VMware since the Broadcom acquisition I have been asked more and more about alternatives for running SQL Server.

One of the options that has repeatedly cropped up is KubeVirt

KubeVirt provides the ability to run virtual machines in Kubernetes…so essentially could provide an option to “lift and shift” VMs from VMware to a Kubernetes cluster.

Read on to learn a bit more about KubeVirt, including how to set up a Windows-based virtual machine with it. Andrew does document some performance woes, so that’d be a big concern to work out the why behind this.

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Upgrading to SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff checks out a tool built into SSMS 22:

Starting with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22, the Hybrid & Migration Component delivers a streamlined experience for upgrade assessment and side-by-side migration. This replaces the Data Migration Assistant (DMA) that retired on July 16, 2025, consolidating assessment and migration into one tool. So what are the key capabilities:

Click through for those capabilities and a few tips on how to use it. I’m not sure how clean the upgrade process is to 2025 versus standalone installation. I’d imagine that, if you’re not using something like ML Services, it’s probably fine.

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Thoughts on Data Modeling

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones has a two-fer. First up, he asks an opinion question about data modeling:

Recently, I had a few questions on database modeling. One was posted in the SQL Server Central forums, and a customer asked about ERD tooling on the same day. This came shortly after Redgate acquired Vertabelo (now Redgate Data Modeler). This stood out to me as very rarely in the last few years have I found people consulting and updating a diagram while performing database development.

Second, he takes a peek at a tool Redgate purchased:

Redgate acquired a data modeling tool from Vertabelo recently and I wanted to explore how it works. This is a short look at this tool and how it might be useful in working with databases.

My experience with data modeling has been that only the really large companies did a lot of work with upfront data modeling and keeping logical models up to date. It’s still quite useful for data warehouses, and that’s where the people I know who do a lot of data modeling make their living. But I find it’s too much of a hassle in fast-paced environments, especially when I can keep most or all of the data model in my head and I’m the person managing it all.

Essentially, data models are useful to the extent that they’re approximately true. But because they quickly get out of sync with reality, they quickly go from “quite useful” to “dirty lies.”

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