A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
This week I went back through my PostgreSQL notes and listed what is different between SQL Server and Postgres. These are the things I would pay close attention to when doing a migration.
Most migration issues are not caused by the data. They come from assuming Postgres works the same way as SQL Server.
Click through for the list. Some of these things are fairly straightforward, but others can be a pretty big deal and necessitate significant rewrites of existing code bases.
Leave a CommentTeo Lachev answers a question:
A current engagement calls for migrating a rather elaborate financial dashboard from Qlik to Power BI. Just when we think there is light at the end of the tunnel, another business rule is unearthed in Qlik that we need to convert. These rules range from business calculations and dummy rows in dimension tables to allocation overrides.
This brings us to an important question: Where should all this business logic live?
Click through for Teo’s answer to this question.
Leave a CommentJohn Deardurff shares some thoughts:
Anyone who has managed SQL Server for a while probably recognizes the traditional 5% reorganize or 30% rebuild approach. But those Index Fragmentation Thresholds were completely made up. Primarily as they were simple values to baseline that made it easy to automate. But today we need to ask whether fragmentation percentage is really the best measurement for deciding when an index needs maintenance.
As storage has changed, Microsoft guidance around index maintenance has changed. The question should no longer be; How fragmented is my index? A better question is: How efficiently are the pages being used, and how much work is needed to access my data?
Click through for a demo of what automatic index compaction can do in Azure SQL Database. The two important notes I have are as follows. First, as John points out, automatic index compaction does not update statistics, so you’d still need to take care of that. Second, I don’t think there’s ever a good use case for REORGANIZE.
Lee Markum builds an environment:
First of all, this will be a blog post series. There is simply too much to cover in one blog post and expect people to read it. This blog post is going to be about how I laid the foundation for what I was planning to build.
At the end of the process, I had a fully functional, four machine lab that looks like the below. I used Windows Server 2025 OS Evaluation Edition. I created a Windows Cluster and set up an Availability Group.
Lee points out some of the difficulties along the way, and I agree that it looks pretty frustrating.
Leave a CommentHeidi Hasting sees something new:
Hiya!
“Ooh, what’s this?”
That was me this week, poking around the OneLake catalog. It keeps getting better and better, and I spotted something that made my admin heart very happy. The Govern tab now has Configurations > Tenant settings, right there in the catalog.
Click through to see what’s there. It’s still not ideal for non-admin users, as Heidi points out, but it is a marginal improvement over what was there before.
Leave a CommentChris Webb tries something out:
When the new Send Email action was announced for Fabric Dataflows Gen2 – which allows you to send an email from a dataflow when it refreshes – I was curious to know if you could use it to send multiple emails to multiple different people, and therefore do report bursting or something like it. There are already several different ways to do this in Power BI/Fabric, for example using Power BI report subscriptions or paginated reports, but there might some cases where using a dataflow is easier or more convenient. It turns out that is is possible but only in combination with another relatively new feature: Parameterised Dataflows.
Click through for an example that sends a batch of e-mails. Not all of the functionality is fully baked yet, but it does have the potential to be interesting.
Leave a CommentOur requirement is to record unsuccessful login attempts i.e. failed logins for security and compliance reasons. The database estate includes SQL Servers, Azure SQL Databases, and Azure SQL Managed Instances. How can I configure auditing for failed logins for each of these database environments?
Read on for the answer in SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance.
Leave a CommentAndy Brownsword tries and tries again:
Retries are a useful part of resilient pipelines. However, retries aren’t created equal, so I want to dive into recent changes to pipeline activity retries and the benefits they bring.
Read on to learn more about new capabilities such as introducing built-in exponential back-off and specific retry conditions.
Leave a CommentStephanie Bruno breaks out the green visor:
Your nonprofit is ready to escape spreadsheet chaos and move into Power BI. Then you open the licensing page. Pro? Premium Per User? Fabric capacity? F2, F64, F-what?! If you’re a nonprofit trying to make every dollar count, figuring out what to buy can feel like reading a spellbook in a language you don’t speak. We get this question a lot, so here’s our plain-language guide.
Prices below are in USD and current as of October 2026. Microsoft changes licensing pretty often, so always double-check the official nonprofit offers page before you buy.
Read on for several tips on how to get the most out of Power BI if you do work for a non-profit organization.
Leave a CommentLouis Davidson works with three amigos:
To get the total, there are a few ways, which I will demonstrate in the next sections on the aggregation functions,
ROLLUP,CUBE, and thenGROUPING SETS. Grouping sets are the most flexible, in that they let you do what the other two can do, but with more control. But knowing the others is important because it is how most ad hoc queries will be written.
It’s uncommon that I use GROUPING SETS() in my code, but every time I do, I’m thankful that it exists.