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Month: July 2025

Fast-Path Search in OrioleDB

Published 2025-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Alexander Korotkov describes a new feature coming to OrioleDB:

When you optimize the CPU time of a transactional database management system, it comes down to one question: how fast can you read a page without breaking consistency? In this post, we explore how OrioleDB avoids locks, trims memory copies, and — starting with beta12 — even bypasses both copying and tuple deforming altogether for fixed-length types during intra-page search. This means that not only are memory copies skipped, but the overhead of reconstructing tuples is also eliminated. The result: an even faster read path, with no manual tuning required.

Read on to see what’s new and how it works.

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Installing SQL Server CUs via dbatools

Published 2025-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

David Seis updates an instance or thirty:

Keeping your SQL Server instance up to date with the latest service packs and cumulative updates is one of the key components of SQL Server security. In this blog post, we will audit the dbatools command Update-DbaInstance, which can save you hours every month and help keep your environment more secure.

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. Update-DbaInstance is powerful tool to automate the update of one or many SQL server instances without needing to log in.

Click through for David’s thoughts on the cmdlet.

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Query Store Plan Forcing and RECOMPILE

Published 2025-07-18 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea tests Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

It’s 3AM and I’m curious if Query Store plan forcing works on queries that use the RECOMPILE hint (aka OPTION(RECOMPILE) ).
So might as well make a blog post out of it.

Hmm, on the one hand, Vlad blatantly violates Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which loses points. On the other hand, Vlad dunks hard on LLMs, gaining points. I’m so conflicted right now…

But not about reading Vlad’s post. Go read it.

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Choosing a Good Split for a Decision Tree

Published 2025-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Ivan Palomares Carrascosa continues a series on decision trees:

But what are the underlying mechanisms that make decision trees so well-suited for various predictive tasks? And what criteria are internally used to construct them? Specifically, how are nodes recursively split as the tree-shaped structure is formed? This article takes a closer look at the inner workings of decision trees, focusing on how branches are created through deliberate, data-driven splitting (spoiler: it certainly doesn’t happen at random).

One of the main principles of CART is around finding efficient splits for trees, and this digs into some of those details.

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Result Set Chaining in Snowflake

Published 2025-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie tries out a new operator:

In a recent Snowflake release, a slick new operator quietly entered the scene: ->>. This little guy can make certain query workflows both more readable and more efficient—especially when you’re dealing with multi-step commands like SHOW, LIST, or DESCRIBE.

Click through to see how it works. Seems that this operator has some pretty strict limitations, but for certain use cases, it’s quite nice.

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Private Endpoints in Fabric Eventstream now GA

Published 2025-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Lin makes an announcement:

We’re excited to announce the General Availability of Managed Private Endpoints (MPE) in Fabric Eventstream. This network security feature allows you to stream data from Azure resources to Fabric over a private and secure network without the complexity of manual network configurations.

Read on to see what private endpoints give you and what’s new for general availability.

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Summer 2025 SQL ConstantCare Population Report

Published 2025-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar shares the numbers:

In this quarter’s update of our SQL ConstantCare® population report, showing how quickly (or slowly) folks adopt new versions of SQL Server, the data is very similar to last quarter. SQL Server 2019 still rules the market:

Click through to see where people are at in Brent’s sample of the market. Alan Cranfield has some numbers for SQL Server on AWS and those come pretty close to what Brent’s sample shows as well.

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Zone Redundancy in Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2025-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal explains what zone redundancy is in Azure:

Do you know what happens when you enable zonal redundancy for your SQL managed instance?

Lets define it first (in the context of Business-Critical tier) – zonal redundancy is achieved by placing compute and storage replicas in different availability zones (3) and then using underlying Always On availability group to replicate data changes from the primary instance to standby replicas in other availability zones. 

Availability zones are in the same Azure region, so it works well for high availability but isn’t as good for disaster recovery: if an entire region goes down, zone redundancy won’t help you very much. Also, be aware that you’re paying for what’s running in those three zones because TANSTAAFL.

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GUID Hunting for Power BI Performance Load Testing

Published 2025-07-17 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finds some UUIDs:

When completing the Power BI performance load testing, you will need to get details from your Power BI report and App Workspace, which will later be used in the PBIReport.JSON file.

In this blog post I will show you how to find those details, so that when it comes time to add it to the PBIReport.JSON file, it will be easy to plug the values in.

The reason for a separate blog post is because you will have to find the GUIDs that are used, which takes a bit of time and knowledge to find the correct GUID for the right value.

Click through for the most unsatisfying Easter egg hunt you could imagine. Gilbert then continues to pull out slider and filter data values.

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