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Day: June 26, 2025

What’s New in Microsoft Fabric, June 2025 Edition

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc has a big list for us:

The June 2025 Fabric update introduces several key enhancements across multiple areas. Power BI celebrates its 10th anniversary with a range of community events, contests, expert-led sessions, and special certification exam discounts. In Data Engineering, Fabric Notebooks now support integration with variable libraries in preview, empowering users to manage configuration values centrally for improved modularity and scalability.

Additional updates span Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, and Data Factory, with new features such as upgraded AI functions, enhanced real-time data capabilities, and improvements to data ingestion and security. These updates collectively aim to streamline workflows, boost performance, and foster greater collaboration across teams.

Click through for the full update.

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Building Entity-Relationship Diagrams with DBeaver

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Stokes builds a diagram:

Even the most experienced database professionals are known to feel a little anxious when peering into an unfamiliar database. Hopefully, they inspect to see how the data is normalized and how the various tables are combined to answer complex queries.  Entity Relationship Maps (ERM) provide a visual overview of how tables are related and can document the structure of the data.

Read on to see how you can do this with the DBeaver database access client.

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Choosing Fields to Hide in Power BI

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has something up his sleeve:

To tidy up your Power BI solution, there are some options, and one of them is hiding fields from the report view. This option, although simple, has a significant impact on making your Power BI solution very tidy and clean and easier to maintain. However, you might wonder what are fields that have to be hidden in Power BI? In this article, I will explain how to hide a field in report view, and then what are fields which are a good candidate for this option. If you like to learn more about Power BI. Read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

The very short answer is, hide things that business users won’t (or shouldn’t) care about. Reza gives much more guidance on the topic.

Based on the comments section, this appears to be a re-post from several years ago, but still worth reading because the content is evergreen.

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Testing Database Backups with dbatools

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

David Seis performs a test:

In this blog post, we will audit the dbatools command Test-DbaLastBackup. I will test, review, and evaluate the script based on a series of identical steps. Our goal is to provide insights, warnings, and recommendations to help you use this script effectively and safely. Test-DbaLastBackup is a powerful tool to automate the validation of a backup. Backup testing should be a regular part of SQL Server maintenance and this command works well in automating this task.

Click through for a dive into the cmdlet. I’m a big fan of this cmdlet because it drastically simplifies the process of ensuring that your backups are good.

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Checking Disk Free Space on Mount Points in SQL Server

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins doesn’t need drive letters:

I have some SQL Servers and the  file system is organised with mount points. SQL Server is configured to distribute the system files , data , transaction log and tempdb files on those mountpints. As these are Production systems – the DBA does not have permanent access to the Disak Manager without a request for elevated privileges. But they do have privileges to execute administration type of queries. 

Do you have a query that allows the DBA to excute a query to determine the Total Size , Available Size and Space Free on the mountpoints 

Read on for the answer, as well as a link to an older article from Tom on the topic.

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Moving tempdb to a Temporary Disk in a Cloud

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Horner doesn’t need permanence:

One of the simplest yet most impactful performance optimizations for SQL Server is relocating the tempdb system database to a fast, dedicated disk—especially if that disk is temporary or ephemeral. This is a common practice in cloud environments and high-performance database systems where tempdb churn is high and doesn’t require persistence across reboots.

Click through for more information on how this can work well for you, as well as how to do it safely and things to keep in mind. One thing I would add is, I vaguely recall that on Azure at least, the temporary D: drive might not be mapped at startup, and it may take a few seconds after startup for the mapping to occur. Thus, it may be a good idea to have the SQL Server service start on a delay to ensure that you don’t run into an issue due to task ordering on startup.

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