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Day: March 19, 2025

Improving the Microsoft Fabric Copy Job

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Krishnakumar Rukmangathan makes a copy:

Copy Job has been a go-to tool for simplified data ingestion in Microsoft Fabric, offering a seamless data movement experience from any source to any destination. Whether you need batch or incremental copying, it provides the flexibility to meet diverse data needs while maintaining a simple and intuitive workflow.

We continuously refine Copy Job based on customer feedback, enhancing both functionality and user experience. In this update, we’re introducing three key UX improvements designed to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency.

Read on for those three improvements.

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An Explanation of PostgreSQL’s Citus Extension

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Craig Kerstiens covers a misunderstood extension:

Citus is in a small class of the most advanced Postgres extensions that exist. While there are many Postgres extensions out there, few have as many hooks into Postgres or change the storage and query behavior in such a dramatic way. Most that come to Citus have very wrong assumptions. Citus turns Postgres into a sharded, distributed, horizontally scalable database (that’s a mouthful), but it does so for very specific purposes.

Read on to learn when Citus can work well, when it isn’t a good fit, and a few architecture and design recommendations around using the extension.

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Understanding Availability Zones in Azure

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Mika Sutinen explains some of the nuance around Azure availability zones:


Azure Availability Zones help provide resiliency to your database services within an Azure Region. I simply love it how simple Microsoft has made building geographically dispersed database services. If you’ve ever designed and deployed multi-site, highly available database services in on-premises, you know what I am talking about.

However, with the Availability Zones in Azure, there are a couple of things to know. I’ve learned my lessons the hard way, so in this post I am providing some tools and guidance on how to avoid some pitfalls when building multi-zone database services.

Click through for that guidance.

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Linting SQL with SQLFluff

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush busts out a linter:

I thought I didn’t care about linting, and lately, I haven’t written a lot of SQL, but for the SQL I do write, I have SQLFluff to help me format it. A friend of mine is big into SQLFluff and finally talked me into installing and using it. For more information about SQLFluff itself, visit here.

Josephine shows off some of the configuration for PostgreSQL’s psql as well as SQL Server’s T-SQL.

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Regular Expression Matches in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Tobias McNulty now has two problems:

regexp_matches() and regexp_match() are two similar string functions that support regular expression matching directly in the PostgreSQL database. regexp_matches() was added in PostgreSQL 8.3, and regexp_match() was added in PostgreSQL 10 (keep reading to see how ChatGPT struggled to answer this question).

Read on for that as well as plenty more information on how the two work, and even a bonus snippet on another regular expression function.

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Foreign Key Relationships in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouses

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover looks at key constraints:

In late 2024, I noticed a comment on the Microsoft Learn site stating that foreign keys could improve query performance on tables in a Fabric warehouse. That claim immediately caught my attention. I wanted to answer a simple question: Do relationships help, hurt, or have no effect when added to tables in a Fabric warehouse?

Let’s get more specific—do foreign keys improve query performance when reading data (not loading)? In other words, do they make queries run faster?

Sadly, the answer is not as promising as with SQL Server. But this also makes sense considering the distributed nature of Fabric data warehouses.

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