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Day: April 22, 2025

Pitfalls in Software Testing

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ngọc lê builds a list:

Software testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the delivery of high-quality products. However, even experienced testers can fall into common traps that compromise the effectiveness of testing processes, allowing defects to slip into production. Avoiding these pitfalls is essential for maintaining the reliability and functionality of software. In this blog, we’ll explore some of the most common software testing mistakes and provide strategies to overcome them.

This is specifically for software testing, but most of these principles apply the same for database work.

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Comparing Microsoft Fabric to Snowflake

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Evanjalin Joseph lays out a comparison:

Take ShopSmart, a global retail chain that operates both online and offline. The company wants to combine its sales, inventory, and customer data in order to facilitate real-time reporting and predictive analytics. Two top platforms are being assessed by the IT team for this change.

Azure, Power BI, and Microsoft 365 are already widely used by ShopSmart, which is in line with Fabric’s integrated ecosystem. The alternative, however, provides more multi-cloud flexibility and strong performance on structured data. The group has to choose between selecting a more specialized warehousing solution with more deployment options or making use of its current Microsoft investments.

Let’s examine the differences between the two platforms.

Click through for an overview of each platform and how they stack up against one another.

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Digging into the Microsoft Fabric Monitoring Hub

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shows off Microsoft Fabric’s Monitor hub:

When we create a data solution for our company or clients, we create the best, right? Sure, we do. But still, monitoring the solution is something you should never forget. Your solution can be stable, but the data usually isn’t. And it just feels good to know all the data has been processed correctly.

So, let’s dig into monitoring Microsoft Fabric.

Read on to see how it works, as well as plenty of thoughts, advice, and critique from Reitse.

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The CHOOSE Function in SQL Server

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson chooses the form of our destroyer:

I preface a lot of what I write with whether or not it is for a “practical” use. One of the Simple Talk authors used this function in a forthcoming article. and I realized I hadn’t heard of it before (or I forgot about it… which is not completely unlikely.) The practical use was to generate some data and have at least a little variety to the values.

The CHOOSE function has this syntax.

CHOOSE(item_to_choose, item1, item2 [,item3]…[itemN])

In fairness to Louis, CHOOSE() was one of those additions to SQL Server 2012 that we mostly forgot about. It’s similar in that vein to IIF() if you weren’t living in Excel at the time. In any event, Louis takes CHOOSE() through its paces, showing some useful scenarios and stretching the limits to see what happens.

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Dynamic Pareto Analysis in Power BI

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari get us to 80%:

The Pareto analysis is an analytical technique used to identify the most impactful elements within a dataset, based on the principle that a small proportion of causes often leads to a large proportion of effects. For example, the ABC Classification in DAX Patterns is also based on the Pareto principle. However, typical implementations often face limitations. The analysis based on the Pareto principle commonly uses categorical axes, such as customer names or identifiers, making it impossible to leverage a continuous axis on a Power BI line chart. A categorical axis creates a scrollbar on the line chart when there are too many data points, limiting the ability to compare the distribution of data points in different categories within the same line chart.

This article shows how to overcome this limitation by introducing a numeric axis reflecting each item’s position based on the selected measure.

Read on to see how it all works.

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Designing a Microsoft Fabric Workspace

Published 2025-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ron L’Esteve lays it out:

When planning a Data Platform for your organization on Microsoft Fabric, you need to consider workspaces during your design process. Proper workspace design is critical for the organization and consumption of Fabric items. Understanding how to effectively manage Microsoft Fabric workspaces can streamline your processes.

If your workspaces are not set up in a way that aligns with functional business verticals or environments (such as Dev/UAT/Prod), you will end up spending a significant amount of time and effort re-factoring this technical debt to meet the desired organizational structures. While it seems trivial to simply move a report, pipeline, or other workload from one workspace to another, the inbuilt dependencies can often be complex. With efficient planning and design efforts, these problems can be avoided.

Click through for Ron’s advice.

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