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Month: September 2025

An Introduction to Bayesian Regression

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ivan Palomares Carrascosa covers the concept of Bayesian regression:

In this article, you will learn:

  • The fundamental difference between traditional regression, which uses single fixed values for its parameters, and Bayesian regression, which models them as probability distributions.
  • How this probabilistic approach allows the model to produce a full distribution of possible outcomes, thereby quantifying the uncertainty in its predictions.
  • How to implement a simple Bayesian regression model in Python with scikit-learn.

My understanding is that both Bayesian and traditional regression techniques get you to (roughly) the same place, but the Bayesian approach makes it harder to forget that the regression line you draw doesn’t actually exist and everything has uncertainty.

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The Downside of Sticking to the Legacy Cardinality Estimator

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Stephen Planck recommends taking the plunge:

Cardinality estimation (CE) is how the optimizer predicts the number of rows that will flow through each operator in a plan. Those estimates drive cost, join choices, memory grants, and ultimately latency and resource usage. SQL Server has shipped multiple CE models over time. The pre-2014 model—commonly called the legacy CE—dates back to SQL Server 7.0. Starting in SQL Server 2014, Microsoft introduced a new CE and has continued refining it in later releases, including SQL Server 2022. Keeping the legacy CE turned on in SQL Server 2022 is usually the wrong long-term choice.

One thing to note is that the “new” cardinality estimator has been out for a decade. It’s not really that new anymore, and it’s not going anywhere soon. Yeah, there are still trade-offs where some queries are better on the legacy estimator, but for the people who use that as their reason for not using the new estimator, what have you done in the past decade to address this and tune those queries to work better? If the answer is “nothing,” it’s not the cardinality estimator’s fault here.

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Fun with the Data API Builder

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jess Pomfret tries out the Data API Builder:

I’ve been hearing about the Data API Builder (dab) for a while now, but I hadn’t found a reason to play with it myself.

Well I recently found I had a SQL Server database that could use an API so I could interact with it from an Azure Function. I immediately thought about DAB and was excited to have a reason to test it out.

Let me tell you – this thing is pretty neat!

Jess has started a new series and the first post involves installing and trying out the service.

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Error 845 Timeout in DBCC CHECKTABLE

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Eitan Blumin troubleshoots an odd issue:

A customer reported that running DBCC CHECKTABLE on several different tables kept failing with the exact same error:

Msg 845, Sev 17: Time-out occurred while waiting for buffer latch type 4 for page (1:27527325), database ID 10.
Msg 1823, Sev 17: A database snapshot cannot be created because it failed to start.
Msg 7928, Sev 17: The database snapshot for online checks could not be created.

Read on to learn more about Eitan’s troubleshooting process, what the cause of the issue was, and the fixes (both the immediate and complete ones) needed to resolve the issue.

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Worst-Case Testing for Direct Lake Semantic Models

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb updates a prior post:

Two years ago I wrote a detailed post on how to do performance testing for Direct Lake semantic models. In that post I talked about how important it is to run worst-case scenario tests to see how your model performs when there is no model data present in memory, and how it was possible to clear all the data held in memory by doing a full refresh of the semantic model. Recently, however, a long-awaited performance improvement for Direct Lake has been released which means a full semantic model refresh may no longer page all data out of memory – which is great, but which also makes running performance tests a bit more complicated.

Read on to learn more about the improvement as well as how you can still perform your performance testing.

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A Hidden Slowdown in PostgreSQL Restores

Published 2025-09-02 by Kevin Feasel

Warda Bibi explains why a large PostgreSQL database restoration can take a long time:

In July 2025, during the PG19-1 CommitFest, I reviewed a patch targeting the lack of parallelism when adding foreign keys in pg_restore. Around the same time, I was helping a client with a large production migration where pg_restore dragged on for more than 24 hours and crashed multiple times.

In this blog, I will talk about the technical limitations in PostgreSQL, the proposed fix, and a practical workaround for surviving large restores.

The reason for the slowdown is a bit wild to me, though I suppose somebody could edit the backup files manually after pg_dump writes them out.

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