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Day: August 6, 2025

Azure API Management in front of Databricks and OpenAI

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele has a follow-up:

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using Azure API Management with Databricks Model Serving endpoints. It struck a chord with a lot of people using Databricks on Azure specifically, because more and more people and organizations are trying their damndest to wrangle all the APIs they use and/or deploy themselves. Recently, I got an email from someone who read it and asked a really good question:

Click through for that question, as well as Drew’s answer.

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Data Dictionaries in Power BI

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson builds a dictionary:

Have you ever opened a Power BI report and felt overwhelmed by all the columns, measures, and tables?

It can feel like a guessing game trying to figure out what each field represents.

A well-built data dictionary eliminates that confusion, giving you clarity and confidence when exploring reports.

This is one of those bits of documentation that can be incredibly useful but people rarely keep it up to date.

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Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse July 2025 Recap

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Charles Webb lays out some updates:

Welcome to What’s New in Fabric Warehouse, where we’ll spotlight our work improving quality, delivering major performance enhancements, boosting developer productivity, and our continuous investments in security. Whether you’re migrating from Synapse, optimizing your workloads, writing SQL in VS Code, or exploring new APIs, this roundup has something for every data professional. With quality and experience at the forefront, we’ve summarized and highlighted key improvements we think you’ll love, organized into three sections:

  1. What’s New
  2. Docs Updates
  3. Roadmap Updates

Read on for that update.

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Thoughts on Views

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Celko shares some thoughts on views, as well as recursive common table expressions:

VIEWs are an undervalued and underused feature in SQL. They basically consist of a query that has been given a name, and a parameter list, so can be used like an inline macro. Technically, you’re supposed to think of it as a virtual table. 

The idea of an inline macro or inline function goes way back to the first versions of Fortran and later BASIC. Depending on the product, the syntax might look like this: FN DOUBLE (N) = (N + N). You had to give the name of the Macro, a simple optional parameter list, assignment operator, usually an =, and the text of the computation. It was often important to put parentheses around the body of the macro, or to have a compiler that would do this for you. 

Read on for the article and a platform-agnostic coverage of views. My problem with views is that developers try to use them to cover a lot of ruin and then they ask why such a simple SELECT * FROM Something query is so slow.

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ACE Drivers and Linked Servers

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sean Gallardy has a public service announcement:

There’s been a resurgence of people pointing out dumps occurring in SQL Server when using linked servers with the ACE drivers. It’s been on the MCM email list, forums, SQL Server Feedback site, everywhere, and it’s basically the same response every time… ACE drivers were not made to be used as linked server drivers in SQL Server.

To be fair, how could the company that produces Access and Excel possibly be in contact with the company that produces SQL Server and create a driver that works well?

I have used the ACE drivers for PolyBase, though that was for fairly light-duty work and thus I haven’t seen any dumps. But I guess if you want a higher-quality driver, go with someone like CData.

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