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Day: May 13, 2025

Billing and Microsoft Fabric Preview Features

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven explains that TANSTAAFL:

First of all, when using Preview features in Fabric, you should be aware of the small print.

Next, we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

Because: preview does not mean free! Let me explain.

Two of those preview features – SQL Database and Workspace Monitoring – have recently moved to a charging model as Fabric develops further. It’s essential to understand these adjustments if you want to maximize your resources, govern your capacity and efficiently control expenses.

Read on to learn more. It’s very uncommon for preview features in Azure to come with a bill, so make sure you don’t get surprised by these.

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Troubleshooting resmgr:cpu quantum in Oracle

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman continues a series on performance tuning in Oracle:

Let’s break it down:

  • RESMGR = Oracle Resource Manager
  • CPU Quantum = The time slice a session is allowed to consume CPU

This wait event indicates that a session is throttled by Oracle Resource Manager because it’s trying to use more CPU than its current consumer group allows. This is intentional: Resource Manager is designed to prevent a single user or group from monopolizing system resources.

Read on to learn more about this wait type and what you can do if you experience it.

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The Script-Based Nature of SQL Agent Jobs

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Farley praises the textual nature of SQL Agent jobs:

Of course, there are some things that I don’t like about SQL Agent. For example, I’ve never been a big fan of the Operator stuff. I’m sure there are organisations that leverage every feature of it, including pagers, but that has never been me or my clients. Reports that show the status of the jobs are generally more useful than simply relying on Job Notifications (although this also varies from client to client), but on the whole, it’s an area I’m okay, but not writing home about.

The thing I’m going to write about today though – one of my favourite aspects of SQL Agent Jobs – is that it’s all so scriptable.

Read on to learn more. I agree with Rob: it took a little while for me to understand (i.e., actually read what the job is doing), but I like that there’s nothing magical about SQL Agent and that you can simply put this into source control or even draft your own jobs without the UI once you understand the process well enough.

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Data Recovery in SQL Server without a Backup

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Rodrigo Riberio Gomes digs in:

In more than 10 years of experience, I have dealt with cases where someone has performed incorrect operations on a table, such as updating or deleting wrong rows, in a SQL Server database that does not have full backups available. There are multiple reasons for no full backup: corrupted backups, taking too much time to restore, etc.

In this post, I want to show an alternative for these cases, an ace up one’s sleeve, that you can use to recover data. This method also provides a deep understanding of the internal workings of how your SQL Server stores data. So, in addition to learning how to recover data, you will gain more insights into the internals of SQL.

Read on to see how. Rodrigo also points out some limitations or things that would need to change if you have index compression. I consider this a very neat thing you might need to know but never want to use.

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Comparing Microsoft Fabric Engines

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic performs a comparison:

Before we proceed, an important disclaimer: the guidance I’m providing here is based on both my experience with implementing Microsoft Fabric in real-world scenarios, and the recommended practices provided by Microsoft. 

Please keep in mind that the guidance relies on general recommended practices (I intentionally avoid using the phrase best practices, because the best is very hard to determine and agree on). The word general means that the practice I recommend should be used in most of the respective scenarios, but there will always be edge cases when the recommended practice is simply not the best solution. Therefore, you should always evaluate whether the general recommended practice makes sense in your specific use case.

Click through for a comparison between three engines: the lakehouse, the warehouse, and the eventhouse. It would really simplify things if the lakehouse and warehouse combined into one coherent whole.

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Hash Indexes in MySQL

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis explains how hash indexes work in MySQL:

In MySQL, hash indexes are indexes that are used in queries that use the equality operators like = or <=> (which is the MySQL NULL safe equality operator, equivalent to the SQL Standard IS NOT DISTINCT FROM). Hash indexes are not used in other situations, so they can be useful for things like random or generated PRIMARY KEY values where you are looking up single rows and not needing to order rows or searching for a range of values.

Just like in SQL Server hash indexes only work for in-memory tables, and some of the mechanisms look very similar.

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