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Day: March 31, 2025

Finding Mismatched Rows in Power Query

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks for that other sock:

Finding rows that are in one table, but not the other is one of the most common scenarios happening in any data related applications. You may have customer records coming from two sources, and want to find data rows that exist in one, but not the other. In Power Query, you can use Merge to combine data tables together. Merge can be also used for finding mismatch records. You will learn through this blog post, how in Power Query you can find out which records are missing with Merge, and then report it in Power BI. To learn more about Power BI, read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for the video and article.

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Semantic Search in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Hans-Jürgen Schönig performs a search:

PostgreSQL offers advanced capabilities through extensions like pgvector, which enable semantic search at a level and quality never achieved before. Unlike traditional text search, which mostly relies on trivial string comparison, semantic search in PostgreSQL goes beyond keywords by understanding context and meaning, enhancing relevance.

The quick idea here is that converting words (or parts of words) into vectors can maintain most of the semantic meaning behind the words. Then, when we perform certain types of vector comparisons, we can take advantage of this semantic meaning and find results whose language is different from our query but the concept is a match for what we want. Click through for the full article.

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Building a Simple Microservice with Azure Functions

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Temidayo Omoniyi takes us through an example of creating a microservice:

Today’s architecture is serverless intensive, with multiple microservices performing a particular task. Industries are beginning to move away from traditional monolithic applications, which have a single large codebase infrastructure handling everything, to an easier microservice approach.

Click through for a primer on serverless architecture, microservices, and how to create a simple Python app that acts as a microservice.

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Backup Storage Billing for Fabric SQL Databases

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Amar Digamber Patil makes an announcement:

While compute and data storage are already included in the Fabric capacity-based billing model, after April 1, 2025, backup storage will also be billed. However, customers will only be charged backup storage that exceeds the allocated database size.

Click through to see what’s changing and how to get ahead of this. I’m not sure there are any ways to reduce that backup price, short of managing the data in your database and not having enormous amounts of transaction log activity.

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Source Control without a Budget

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill is looking out for tightwads like us:

Every DBA has been there. Trying to keep track of database schema changes while developers have their fancy Git repositories and version control workflows. Meanwhile, database changes are often handled through a mix of manual scripts, backups, and maybe a SharePoint folder full of “final_final_v2.sql” files.

Did you know that SQL Server already has a built-in tool that can help you track your database schema changes, without spending a dime on third-party tools?

I hadn’t thought about Kevin’s solution that way, but it does make a lot of sense as a way of quickly getting files into a source control repo.

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Finding Microsoft Fabric Administrative Documentation

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven digs through the docs:

Earlier I wrote about the default domain settings, changes to the default tenant setting value for SQL database and I also covered the (rights of the) Fabric Adminsitrator role. Today I want to talk about a more meta-topic: existing documentation on Microsoft Learn, and of course specifically for Admins.

It turns out that there’s a central link for this documentation within Microsoft Learn. Nicky also includes call to action to fix simple documentation issues (such as typos) that you find.

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