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Month: May 2025

Choosing a Warehousing Data Architecture

Published 2025-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra compares and contrasts OLAP architectures:

As discussed in my blog and book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh” (Amazon), organizations are often challenged with choosing the right data architecture to meet their business goals—especially as AI and data-driven decision-making take center stage. To help clarify, here’s a quick review of the four core architectures, followed by guidance on when to use each. Each architecture includes five stages of data movement – ingest, store, transform, model, and visualize (described here).

Click through for James’s take on how each of them works and when you might choose one over the other.

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Writing to Microsoft FabricDelta Tables in Python via DuckDB

Published 2025-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers does a bit of writing:

When I was exploring how to easily write to Delta Tables with a Python notebook, it took me a considerable amount of time to find out how to do this.

This is my learnings below, and from my point of view it makes it easy to write to a Lakehouse table, like what is done with a PySpark notebook.

Click through for one very important note, as well as the process.

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Tracking Wait Classes in Oracle

Published 2025-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman looks for performance bugbears:

When we talk about optimization in Oracle, many DBAs immediately jump into metrics like CPU utilization, I/O throughput, or specific SQL queries. But there’s a critical layer of understanding that often gets overlooked and that’s Oracle Wait Classes. These categories are essential to making sense of what’s really going on inside your database, and they’re often the starting point for diagnosing and optimizing performance.

Read on to learn what wait classes are and why they’re so important for Oracle DBAs.

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Rounded Corners in Power BI

Published 2025-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska breaks out the sandpaper:

I’ve been seeing all kinds of shapes in Power BI reports lately—and seems like there’s a lot of guesswork when it comes to rounded corners. Some people just throw in a number because it “feels modern”, others skip it altogether. But rounding shouldn’t be random.

Wondering what to do with your edges? Putting in a radius just because? Or maybe your designs still feel… too pointy?

Click through for some thoughts on rounding corners in Power BI, as well as how to do it.

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SQL Server Performance Office Hours Episode 10

Published 2025-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has some doozies today:

Many of our Tables have 15 plus guid s from other tables, but not declared as Foreign Key. Plus Foreigne Keys. When I add a Index on for every Foreign Key plus Indexes for declared foreign keys we end up with tables with 30 plus indexes for fks only. We don’t have write performance issues. would you index every fk for every possible join?

Click through for the answer to this and four other questions.

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An Overview of the Power BI Ecosystem

Published 2025-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler looks at tools:

In general, the process to build and manage both models and reports in Power BI can be simplified to a few sequential steps that describe the “lifecycle” of this content. You can see this depicted below, as well as some examples of the various tools that you might use to support each of these steps. Shameless plug, Bravo, Vertipaq Analyzer, and Analyze in Excel were created by SQLBI, and SQLBI is involved in the development of DAX Studio, DAX Optimizer, and Tabular Editor.

Click through for an interesting table showing what fits where. If all you’re using is Power BI Desktop, there’s a whole world of additional functionality you’re missing out on.

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Checking Index Utilization in Oracle

Published 2025-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

David Fitzjarrell wants to see which indexes are in use:

Database performance is one of the biggest areas for DBAs to address, measured primarily in time. Users usually complain when queries “take too long” and immediately run to the DBA team to register their disappointment. One avenue used to address such concerns is the creation and maintenance of indexes, and as any DBA with any experience can attest, simply throwing indexes at a table isn’t necessarily the smartest play; a major concern is if the index is actually being utilized. Oracle, in its wisdom, has provided tools to monitor these objects in the form of system views. Let’s look at what is available and how to get the most benefit out of them.

Click through for some scripts and information on how to tell whether an index is in use or not.

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Counting NULLs in SQL Server Tables

Published 2025-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea counts that which does not exist:

I’ve seen variations of the question “how to count all NULLs in all columns of a table” pop up on reddit once every couple of months, and I figured I’d give it a shot and post here in case anyone else might need it in the future.

Click through for the script. It does require M*N scans, where M represents the average number of columns in each table and N the number of tables in the database. In other words, don’t expect an immediate response.

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