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Curated SQL Posts

Deploying Fabric Resources via ADO

Published 2026-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Lunn continues a series on source control and branching with Microsoft Fabric:

There are a few things you need to check first:

  1. Does the account your going to use to authenticate to (In this case a Service Principal) been added to the workspace with contributor level access?
  2. Has the DevOps Library been updated with the values for the Service Principal and workspace id you are deploying to?
  3. Has any DevOps Environment that is production been gated to to allow deployments only after approval?
  4. Got the list of items to deploy?

You have done all those, then alright! Lets push that button! Flick that switch! Saddle that horse!

Be right back; acquiring horse.

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The Nuances of Using Temp Tables

Published 2026-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley explains a position:

Let me say for starters that I’m pleased we have temporary tables. They’re tremendously useful, but often get abused. Compared to obvious villains like NOLOCK, cursors, and scalar functions, they’re really quite inane (but any of these features can be used for good – trust me). But temporary tables were the one of these I mentioned in last month’s post about signs of a bad query. If nothing else, using temporary tables probably means you’re writing procedural code rather than set-based queries.

The scenario I want to talk about is using temporary tables to materialise a set of data, ahead of using it in a separate query a moment later. That’s essentially what Jeff Taylor is asking us to comment on.

I agree very strongly with Rob’s position. In stored procedures, temp tables should be there for a specific reason, a resignation that it is a second- or third-best design decision. But sometimes, you need second-best because first-best doesn’t perform well enough.

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Building an Attack Profile for msdb

Published 2026-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Fabiano Amorim takes us through a thought process:

SQL Server DBAs routinely rely on automation: SQL Server Agent jobs, maintenance plans, refresh processes, restore scripts, replication cleanup, CDC operations, cross-database modules, and temporary objects. These workflows are often trusted because they’re normal – and that’s precisely why they deserve more attention. 

The goal of this article is not to provide exploit recipes. Instead, it’s to help DBAs answer a practical question: how do I know whether my SQL Server instances are exposed to this kind of risk, what should I monitor, and what should I change when I find a problem? 

Click through for the process.

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Thoughts on Temp Tables

Published 2026-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword shares an opinion:

For August’s T-SQL Tuesday ask, Jeff has thrown temp tables to the wolves. Does the community like or loathe their usage?

I’ll predict a few ‘it depends’ responses, and I lean towards Jeff’s position that they’re more of the exception than the rule. I’d argue there’s one particular scenario where this exception becomes exceptional (heh).

I imagine that this topic will get a bit of play this month and that it will be a bit more contentious than some might expect. I do like Andy’s scenario of when temp tables become quite valuable.

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Dealing with Catch-All Queries

Published 2026-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Dualcore DBA handles an overly broad class of query:

We have a query that SELECTs from the Users table that takes multiple optional parameters and filters the output based on those.

Whilst fairly easy to read and write, queries written in this way often underperform.

This is a very generous understatement. Click through for two ways to improve the performance of such queries, as well as the pros and cons of each.

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Choosing COUNTROWS() over DISTINCTCOUNT() in DAX

Published 2026-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark provides some guidance:

Counting transactions is one of the most common things a retail model is asked to do. How many transactions did we do in March. How many in New Zealand. How many involved a T-shirt.

The obvious measure is the one everybody writes:

Transactions = DISTINCTCOUNT ( FactTransaction[TransactionID] )


It is correct, and on a large fact table it is one of the most expensive things you can ask the storage engine to do.

Read on for a better alternative, and more importantly, when it’s a better alternative.

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Reviewing the SQL Server 2022 STIG

Published 2026-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Marlon Ribunal reads some guidance:

Security on your SQL Server is important. That doesn’t need any explaining. But where do you start when evaluating the security of your SQL Server? If you are like me, and probably for many DBAs, that’s the hardest part. You know security matters, but without a structured baseline, it’s easy to overlook configuration issues that could expose your environment to unnecessary risk. Starting with a proven checklist gives you a clear way to identify gaps before they become problems.

And how do you even implement the principle of least privilege on the instance and database level?

Read on to see what the US Department of Defense recommends. Also, I like pointing out Tracy Boggiano’s dbachecks updates that include CIS security auditing, though that is a few years old at this point so I’m not 100% sure how well it works.

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Tips on When to Use Microsoft Fabric Shortcuts

Published 2026-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra offers up some guidance:

Imagine separate Sales, Finance, Shared Data, and Executive Analytics workspaces. Sales owns sales transactions, Finance owns budgets, and Shared Data owns common tables such as Customer, Product, and Date. Executive Analytics needs selected data from all three, but it does not want to copy everything into another lakehouse and maintain another set of pipelines. Instead, it creates shortcuts to the authoritative tables and presents them together in its own lakehouse.

This is where the beauty of Fabric OneLake shortcuts becomes obvious. To a report developer or analyst, the Executive Analytics lakehouse can look like one complete collection of tables. That person might not even know which tables are physically stored there and which are shortcuts—and usually should not need to know. Fabric resolves those paths behind the scenes, which is one reason I call Fabric “the great data unifier”: it can present one logical data estate without forcing all the data into one physical location.

Click through to learn more about what shortcuts are, how they work, and when you should (or should not) use them.

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A Performance Monitoring Update

Published 2026-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a new video:

Erik Darling here with Darling Data, the one, the only, the monitoring tool mogul of SQL Server. Today I wanted to sort of update people on the state of the performance monitor project because there are some things that are useful to the general population that I feel like I should bring up.

So the current version of the performance monitor is 3.1. If it’s been a while since you’ve tried this thing out, I would suggest giving it another shot because there have been some really, really big improvements, not only in the collected data and sort of visualization and printification of things, but also in the UI, UX, the sort of experience that you get out of it.

Click through for the video and make sure you don’t get sucked into any organ harvesting rings. They may sound alluring at first, but they never work out the way you want them to.

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