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Curated SQL Posts

SQL vs Azure Permissions

Published 2026-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis continues a series on how Azure permissions and SQL Server (or Azure SQL Database) permissions are not the same thing:

Welcome to cloud permissions, where ‘Contributor’ doesn’t mean you can contribute and ‘Reader’ doesn’t mean you can read.

In my last post, I explained the management plane vs data plane split. This post is the promised follow-up for the minimum permission combinations for common DBA tasks. aka, what you need, how to verify it, and how to fix it when it fails.

I’m the guy pushing up my no-longer-existent glasses and saying “Well, actually…” to the first sentence, though stylistically, it’s a good one. But getting past the first sentence, there are some nice breakdowns of what it takes to do what you need to do on a cloud-hosted database.

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Changing SQL Server on Linux Editions

Published 2026-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea swaps the edition:

In this post I cover the steps required to change (downgrade or upgrade) the edition of a SQL Server instance running on Linux.

In my previous post I’ve went through the steps of installing SQL Server 2025 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
While the process is pretty straight-forward, there might be cases where someone can accidentally specify the wrong edition and only notice afterwards.

Luckily, the edition can be changed with just a few commands.

It’d be neat if it worked the same way for Windows.

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Excel Pivot Table Performance Improvement Connecting to Semantic Models

Published 2026-02-04 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has some good news:

Some good news: an important optimisation has rolled out for Excel PivotTables connected to Power BI semantic models! Back in 2019 I wrote about a very common problem affecting the MDX generated by PivotTables connected to Analysis Services where, when subtotals are turned off and grand totals are turned on, the query nevertheless returns the subtotal values. This led to extremely slow, expensive MDX queries being run and a lot of complaints. The nice people on the Excel team have now fixed this problem and PivotTables connected to Power BI semantic models generate MDX queries that only return the values needed by the PivotTable.

Read on to see it in action. What’s wild is that I actually get to use the “MDX” tag here. I had to go back and check the four MDX entries prior to this, and Chris is responsible for three of them. That scans.

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25 Years of SQL Server Central

Published 2026-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones has a retrospective:

The oldest article we have on the site is Tame Those Strings! Part 4 – Numeric Conversions, by me. It’s dated 2001-04-18, though I think that’s a date we picked when we converted all the content from one database to another. The founders agreed sometime during Feb 2001 to jointly run SQL Server Central. Since we each owned the copyright of our articles from another site, we migrated several articles to build up our content library. This was back when Andy, Brian, and I all had full-time jobs and managed the site during breaks, nights, and weekends.

That was 25 years ago.

I think there are a lot of DBAs who cut their teeth on SQL Server with the help of SSC. I know I was one of them, having been a SQL Server Central e-mail subscriber for a very long time. Not 25 years, but 15+, at least.

It was one of the best pieces of advice I received from a poker buddy who was a database architect: first thing in the morning, spend about 20 minutes reading articles. It’s time that nobody else will come in to bother you, and you can focus on learning and self-growth without needing to follow the ebbs and flows of the day.

That blended quite well with some good advice from Sean McCown to set aside an hour a day for learning and experimenting.

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Row Own-Goals

Published 2026-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis didn’t come up with quite as good of a title:

In part 1 of this mini-series, I explained what a rowgoal is and how it works to optimize a query with a TOP or FETCH expression. Part 2 then showed a few less obvious other cases where the optimizer might introduce rowgoals. In all cases so far, those rowgoals were beneficial. They helped the optimizer come up with the best execution plan for the number of rows requested.

Click through for the video.

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Data Series Colors in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Michal Bar shows off a new capability:

A frequent request we receive from dashboard authors is the ability to have greater control over color settings.

Until now, color assignments in real-time dashboards were largely automatic. While this worked for basic scenarios, it often fell short in operational and reporting use cases where color isn’t decoration—it’s meaning. Data Series Colors is a new capability that gives authors direct control over how colors are applied to their visuals.

Read on to see how it works for real-time dashboards.

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Thoughts on SELECT *

Published 2026-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson defends a slighted bit of syntax:

I was about to walk out the door to take a flight, when my phone rang. Our major software system we had just released last week was returning weird data. FirstName and LastName was being reversed. I missed my flight because someone wrote SELECT * instead of SELECT FirstName, LastName and a table structure was reorganized.

Ok, the story was a fabrication, but I wanted to start out with a story that could resonate with the reader. In this post, I want to say a few things about the use of SELECT * and I wanted to make sure it was clear that I am not encouraging more use of SELECT *. Not at all.

I agree with Louis that SELECT * is fine for ad hoc querying. It’s not so great for application code because of the story Louis tells above, but if you’re just checking the contents of a table, whatever. The habit I’d much rather drill into somebody’s head is always have TOP in an ad hoc query. Condition yourself to write SELECT TOP(100) before you start a query. Or have your auto-completion tool of choice (e.g., SQL Prompt) do it for you.

As far as SELECT * or SELECT 1 in EXISTS clauses goes, I used to be in Louis’s camp, though I had a former manager who explained her preference for the latter: if you standardize on SELECT 1 in those clauses, it makes it a lot easier to find inappropriate uses of SELECT * in application code.

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