2025-05-22 – Curated SQL

Kafka Connector for Cosmos DB

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Sudhindra Sheshadrivasan announces a new connector has become generally available:

We’re excited to announce the General Availability (GA) of the Confluent fully managed V2 connector for Apache Kafka® for Azure Cosmos DB! This release marks a major milestone in our mission to simplify real-time data streaming from and to Azure Cosmos DB using Apache Kafka®.

The V2 connector is now production-ready and available directly from the Confluent Cloud connector catalog. This managed connector allows you to seamlessly integrate Azure Cosmos DB with your Kafka-powered event streaming architecture—without worrying about provisioning, scaling, or managing the connector infrastructure.

Read on to learn more about the new connector and what it takes to hook everything up.

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Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Balaji Sankaran has a new announcement:

We are excited to announce Materialized Lake views (MLV) in Microsoft Fabric. Coming soon in preview, MLV is a new feature that allows you to build declarative data pipelines using SQL, complete with built-in data quality rules and automatic monitoring of data transformations. In essence, an MLV is a persisted, continuously updated view of your data that simplifies how you implement multi-stage Lakehouse processing, commonly referred to as medallion architecture.

Read on to see how it works and some of its capabilities.

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Source Control: A Call to Action

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones wants you (to learn about source control):

I have been surprised how many people aren’t comfortable with version control or Git. Many don’t have the habit, but are amenable to it. What I’m amazed by in 2025 is how many people don’t use it, given that so many tools we use to work with databases, and even other systems, will store items in Git. This isn’t just for development code, but also for infrastructure code. Lots of data tools and servers can store data in Git and use it to deploy changes to all kinds of systems. I’d have expected more people to know Git.

If you’re apprehensive about learning Git, check out tools like SourceTree and GitHub Desktop. You can even use the source control built into Visual Studio Code if that’s your tool of choice. These UIs make it significantly easier to work with Git.

Then, if you want to get rid of about 80% of the pain of Git, use feature branching. Here are takes on the topic from Olivier Van Steenlandt and Adron Hall, and I’m sure you can find plenty of other examples. Git can be a pain in the neck, especially when dealing with merge conflicts, but the benefit is well worth it.

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SQL Server Standard Developer Edition

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Pollack is pleased:

SQL Server Developer Edition has for years provided a free data platform to test and develop applications in an environment that has all SQL Server features available at no cost to the organizations that use it. So long as these SQL Servers do not host production workloads, then this edition is ideal for database development.

Starting in SQL Server 2025, a new edition is available for installation: SQL Server Developer Standard Edition. This article dives into this edition, the problems it solves, and why it is a great addition for development teams that use SQL Server!

This is something people in the community have agitated over for years. It’s great that Developer edition has all of the features of Enterprise, but that can be a problem when you build your apps against the equivalent of Enterprise and deploy them to Standard, as there’s a risk you’re using an Enterprise-only feature but don’t know it.

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Power BI Accessibility Checklist

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska has a checklist for us:

Whether you’re designing for executives using tablets, keyboard-only users, or screen reader tech, accessibility is not a nice-to-have. It’s a design standard.

Here’s the accessibility checklist I use in client projects and workshops—and now it’s yours too!

Click through for some good advice on how to make your Power BI dashboards and reports easy to use.

For another take on the topic, I recommend reviewing Meagan Longoria’s checklist as well.

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Monitoring Node Health in Oracle RAC

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman continues a series:

After my last blog post on Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) I was asked to talk about both health and how performance impact can affect a RAC database. Its architecture enables failover, workload distribution, and offers an option to scale performance, but only when all nodes play well together. When one node drags behind or becomes unstable, RAC has no choice but to protect the rest of the cluster- so help me, Oracle Gods. This protection can come in the form of node eviction, which can be both disruptive and at times avoidable with proactive monitoring and intervention.

Click through to learn how Oracle monitors node health, the types of issues you might run into, and how to prevent node eviction.

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