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Day: June 27, 2025

The Costs of Implicit Conversion

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword changes things around:

Implicit conversion happens in SQL Server when the engine detects a mismatch in data types and automatically converts from one type to another. This can be helpful as it makes different types interchangeable and is generally transparent to the client, but it can come with issues.

Usually the downside from implicit conversion is seen through performance impact. But we’ve got something a little different today – an inconsistent result set.

Read on for Andy’s example.

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Customer Managed Keys in OneLake

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Harmeet Gill shows us how we can bring our own keys to data in OneLake:

One of the highly requested features in Microsoft Fabric is now available: the ability to encrypt data in OneLake using your own keys. As organizations face growing data volumes and tighter regulatory expectations, Customer-Managed Keys (CMK) offer a powerful way to enforce enterprise-grade security and ensure strict ownership of encryption keys and access.

With Microsoft’s OneLake, we’ve built a unified data lake that’s open, secure, and ready for enterprise scale. Now, with support for CMK, we’re giving customers the power to take encryption into their own hands.

Read on to learn more about Microsoft’s default for data encryption, and how you can use your own keys to encrypt the data.

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Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code Update

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Sunitha Muthukrishna has an update:

Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code enables users to manage Fabric items efficiently from within VS Code. We are announcing two new features for Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code that allow you to manage Fabric items directly within your workspace. These enhancements are based on customer feedback, and we welcome further input to improve this product.

Click through to see what’s new in the product.

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Index Maintenance for Large Databases

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Russell shares some thoughts:

Most database administrators are comfortable with the daily tasks of backup, CHECKDB, index maintenance, and statistics updates. The available guidance for those topics is extensive. Much less has been written about caring for estates that contain hundreds of databases—or a single database large enough to strain conventional maintenance windows. This post will focus on options that help when individual tables or complete databases grow beyond the point where “standard” maintenance jobs finish in a reasonable time.

Click through for Jon’s advice. My big thing is to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb fragmentation. Index fragmentation was very important back in the days of spinning disk, where accessing pages took much longer if you needed to move the disk head. With NVMe storage, all-flash arrays, and even more prosaic solid state drives, random access is typically at least as fast as sequential access, so there’s no real benefit to having pages of data be contiguous.

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