A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Michael Mayer gives us some changelogs:
Our two sister packages are continuously being improved. A brief summary of the latest changes:
Click through for brief updates on both, as well as two demonstrations of the libraries in action.
Leave a CommentA lot of new documentation was published recently around Fabric capacities, including documentation on how to size and govern capacities and how to troubleshoot problems with capacities. The latter has instructions on how to use the Capacity Metrics App to determine if your Power BI queries are being throttled; it mentions that you can also determine if queries have been throttled using Workspace Monitoring or Log Analytics but doesn’t go into details about how, something I will address in this post.
Read on to learn more.
Leave a CommentConsider a typical sales dashboard filled with charts, KPIs, and large tables.
Users often have to guess what is important, read legends, or ask questions like “What does this mean?” or “Which numbers require attention?”
Many dashboards display data but do not guide users to key insights effectively.
Read on for a few different possibilities based around conditional formatting.
Leave a CommentReitse Eskens tries out the new preview of SQL Server Management Studio 22:
We’re almost used to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21, and now 22 is already in preview. So, let’s see where it’s available for download, install it and see what’s different.
There’s not a huge amount of new functionality, and Reitse spends some time on the big one: that SSMS is moving from the Azure OpenAI integration that they introduced in SSMS 21 to a GitHub Copilot integration in 22, but it’s not in the preview just yet.
Leave a CommentDaniel Vérité checks the version:
With three locale providers (libc, icu and builtin), a PostgreSQL instance has potentially three different versions of Unicode at the same time.
When doing only store/retrieve or basic operations on UTF-8 strings, these versions don’t matter. Postgres checks that the bytes in the strings constitute valid UTF-8 sequences, but not whether the code points corresponding to these sequences are assigned or not.
It starts to matter when interpreting these code points as characters.
Read on to see which features might determine which Unicode provider you might be using.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck takes a peek at a pair of new features in SQL Server 2025:
Often new T-SQL functionality is released first in the Azure cloud environment, before it makes its way to the on-premises SQL Server product. Recently, a new T-SQL function and operator went general available in Azure SQL DB (and Azure SQL Managed Instance): UNISTR and the ANSI SQL string concat operator (||). In this tip, we’ll introduce you to both concepts.
Koen looks at these in Azure SQL Database, though if you have the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you can try both out there as well.
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