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Day: August 7, 2025

Choosing the Right Logging Level in SSIS

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword does a bit of logging:

When creating SQL Agent jobs to execute SSIS packages we can choose the level of logging to be captured. Different settings are more beneficial under the right circumstances so it’s important to understand the differences to make the right decision.

These settings control the internal logging done by SSIS. This is out of the box and freely available, so why not use it effectively.

The real trick is that if you swallow all of the exceptions and errors, everybody will just assume your code is working perfectly and boom, problem solved. Or you could read Andy’s post and get actual information. Whatever works for you, I suppose.

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Making Leading Wildcard Searches Faster

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar flips everything around:

99.9% of you are never gonna need this.

But let’s say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which government it’s being sold to:

This is indeed a pretty uncommon scenario. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever needed to do this once. Well, twice, but in one case I couldn’t actually use the REVERSE() function because the column was itself an awful non-deterministic function and this solution wouldn’t work.

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SQL Server Regular Expressions with Multiple Matches

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson has popped and therefore cannot stop:

The goal of this week’s entry is specifically to show how to see how multiple matches can be viewed using SQL Server’s RegEx, specifically to make the examples clearer (especially in the upcoming entries).

There are several functions that you can use where multiple matches are used as part of the output:

Click through for that list and several examples of relevant functions in action.

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Sundry Causes of Slow Disk Performance

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill thinks about I/O:

“SQL Server is slow.”

We’ve all heard it. But that doesn’t always mean SQL Server is the problem. And “slow” means nothing without context and ability to verify.

More often than you’d think, poor performance is rooted in the one thing most sysadmins don’t touch until it’s on fire: the disk subsystem.

There are other potential causes as well, such as choosing the wrong RAID array format (like, say, RAID 6 for your extremely busy log files) and limited bandwidth to a SAN. Note that Kevin’s listings for what constitutes acceptable disk focuses primarily on on-premises solutions, maybe biased toward direct attached storage versus a SAN. For cloud databases, spikes of 30-60 seconds are perfectly fine, of course.

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Grouping and Binning in Power BI

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad pulls an older post out of the archives:

The latest update of Power BI Desktop (October 2016) has many features. Two of these features are grouping and binning. These features used to create groups of items and visualize them better in the report. Previously you could do that by Power Query or DAX calculated columns, now it is all possible simply through the graphical user interface of report editor. In this post I’ll show you how to create banding (binning) and grouping simply with these features. If you like to learn more about Power BI; read the Power BI online book from Rookie to Rock Star.

How long has Curated SQL been around? Long enough that I covered this the first time. But hey, it’s still valid information.

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