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Curated SQL Posts

Writing Back to a Fabric Data Warehouse via UDF

Published 2025-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge continues a series on write-back options into Microsoft Fabric:

In that article, we took advantage of some of the built-in sample code from the User Data Function editor, as well as some great code examples from Sujata: Example User data functions for Translytical task flows · GitHub

The problem? All of these samples use SQL Databases in Fabric as the backend item.

Jon switches this from a SQL database into a Fabric Data Warehouse, and notes some of the challenges along the way.

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k Nearest Neighbors Search in Elasticsearch

Published 2025-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Govind Singh Rawat looks for nearby documents:

Businesses are increasingly relying on intelligent search capabilities to enhance customer experience, automate insights, and unlock the potential of unstructured information. Elasticsearch, a leading distributed search and analytics engine, is at the heart of many such systems. One of its powerful and lesser-known capabilities is support for k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) search, a method particularly useful for similarity-based retrieval in domains such as semantic search, recommendation engines, and image recognition.

This article delves into what Elasticsearch and k-NN search are, how the two are integrated, and how to configure and optimize k-NN in Elasticsearch for real-world applications.

Click through for a high-level primer on the topic, as well as a few links to additional resources.

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Event Streaming in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Rayis Imayev streams some data:

In my post last week (https://datanrg.blogspot.com/2025/06/salesforce-cdc-data-integration.html), I talked about Salesforce Change Data Capture (CDC) event data streaming, where the initial event destination was file storage in Azure. But what if we anticipate a higher volume of incoming Salesforce source data or the addition of a new data feed? This could create the need for an alternative method of managing incoming events.

Read on to learn more.

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Troubleshooting Network-Related or Instance-Specific Error

Published 2025-07-08 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand has started a new series:

This is the first in a series of articles meant to provide practical solutions to common issues. In this post, we’ll talk about one of the most pervasive error messages out there:

A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections.

Read on to see what a variety of potential solutions to this problem. I was going to joke “It’s always DNS” but Aaron actually has a section on DNS in there.

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Bioconductor in the Wake of ggplot2 4.0.0

Published 2025-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Maria Doyle lays it out:

A major update to ggplot2 (version 4.0.0) is expected around mid-to-late July 2025. It brings a significant internal change, replacing most of the S3 backend with the newer S7 object system. While this improves long-term maintainability and extensibility, it may break Bioconductor packages that depend on ggplot2, especially those that customise how plots are built or styled. Packages that use ggplot2 for typical plotting tasks, such as creating plots with ggplot() and geom_*(), are unlikely to be affected.

Click through for notes, tips on what to do, and whether the code you’re using will break with ggplot2 4.0.0. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Trying out Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring

Published 2025-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens tries out a tool for monitoring Microsoft Fabric installations:

Let me set the scene quickly for you. You’re working for an organisation where Fabric is in the process of being adopted or it’s already fully in use. Regardless of the number of capacities, workspaces, etc, you’re interested in what’s going on in your Fabric environment. You have questions like “Who is using the reports?”, “Who is changing settings in the Admin panel?” and “How is my capacity being used?”.

Read on for a single tool that can solve these sorts of questions.

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Drop Shadows and Power BI

Published 2025-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska has some thoughts on drop shadows:

I get why people add them. Shadows might feel like a design upgrade. A quick way to make your visuals pop or feel more “finished.”

But here’s the thing: just like rounded corners, drop shadows are easy to overdo—and they’re not actually helping. Not with clarity. Not with accessibility. Definitely not with UX.

Click through for Elena’s full thoughts. I’m generally against drop shadows. They draw visual attention without providing the report viewer any value. That’s chartjunk.

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SQL Server Error Log Tips

Published 2025-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill notes that the error log isn’t just for errors:

SQL Server’s Error Logs often get overlooked, until something breaks. But if you know how to use them, they can tell you what went wrong before you’re knee-deep in outage mode.

Whether you’re a sysadmin who inherited SQL or an MSP juggling multiple environments, understanding the ErrorLog is low effort, high return.

Let’s decode the basics.

Click through for examples of information you can find in the error log. Kevin mentions cycling the error log weekly. Back in my DBA days, I’d cycle them daily because I didn’t want the files to grow too large and become unwieldy. Some of this, of course, depends upon how hard people are pushing that box and how much you need to log.

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Backup and Restoration via pgbackrest

Published 2025-07-07 by Kevin Feasel

Warda Bibi sets up a backup management system:

Recently, we worked with a client who was manually backing up their 800GB PostgreSQL database using pg_dump, which was growing rapidly and had backups stored on the same server as the database itself. This setup had several critical issues:

  • Single point of failure: If the server failed, both the database and its backups would be lost.
  • No point-in-time recovery: Accidental data deletion couldn’t be undone.
  • Performance bottlenecks: Backups consumed local storage, impacting database performance.

Read on to see how pgbackrest can address each of these concerns.

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