Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: October 10, 2025

Migrating from Apache Airflow 2 to 3 on Amazon MWAA

Published 2025-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Anurag Srivastava, et al, perform a migration:

Apache Airflow 3.x on Amazon MWAA introduces architectural improvements such as API-based task execution that provides enhanced security and isolation. Other major updates include a redesigned UI for better user experience, scheduler-based backfills for improved performance, and support for Python 3.12. Unlike in-place minor Airflow version upgrades in Amazon MWAA, upgrading to Airflow 3 from Airflow 2 requires careful planning and execution through a migration approach due to fundamental breaking changes.

This migration presents an opportunity to embrace next-generation workflow orchestration capabilities while providing business continuity. However, it’s more than a simple upgrade. Organizations migrating to Airflow 3.x on Amazon MWAA must understand key breaking changes, including the removal of direct metadata database access from workers, deprecation of SubDAGs, changes to default scheduling behavior, and library dependency updates. This post provides best practices and a streamlined approach to successfully navigate this critical migration, providing minimal disruption to your mission-critical data pipelines while maximizing the enhanced capabilities of Airflow 3.

Read on to see what has changed between these two major versions of Airflow, recommendations on what to look out for, and a step-by-step migration guide.

Leave a Comment

Resolving Write Conflicts in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Twinkle Cyril has a conflict:

Fabric Data Warehouse (DW) supports ACID-compliant transactions using standard T-SQL (BEGIN TRANSACTION, COMMIT, ROLLBACK) and uses Snapshot Isolation (SI) as its exclusive concurrency control model. All operations within a transaction are treated atomically—either all succeed or all fail. This ensures that each transaction operates on a consistent snapshot of the data as it existed at the start of the transaction, which means.

Read on to see what this means, as well as what happens when multiple writers interfere with one another and how to avoid these sorts of issues. My Kimball-coded brain says that, if you have a data warehouse, you should have one data loading process. In that case, it’s not easy for the single data loading process to get tripped up on its own.

Leave a Comment

Installing DBeaver and Connecting to Postgres

Published 2025-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley tries out DBeaver:

Whether you’re a seasoned DBA or just exploring database tools, DBeaver offers a powerful, cross-platform GUI for interacting with PostgreSQL and many other databases. As a continuation of the previous blog post on installing PostgreSQL, this guide will walk through installing DBeaver and setting up a connection to the PostgreSQL instance we created.

My biggest takeaway the last time I used DBeaver was, SQL Server has a great thing going with SSMS. But in fairness, that was a while ago and things could very well have gotten better in the meantime. Also, if you have to connect to a variety of data platforms, DBeaver is a pretty solid choice.

Leave a Comment

Explaining Totals in Power BI

Published 2025-10-10 by Kevin Feasel

Sheil Bakhshi performs a comparison:

The long-running debate around how Power BI calculates totals in tables and matrices has been part of the community conversation for years. Greg Deckler has kept the topic alive through his ongoing “broken totals” posts on social media, often suggesting that Power BI should include a simple toggle to make totals behave more like Excel. His continued campaign prompted a detailed reply from Daniel Otykier in his article “No More Measure Totals Shenanigans“, and earlier, Diego Scalioni explored how DAX evaluates totals internally in his post “Cache me if you can: DAX Totals behind the scenes“.

This blog brings all those perspectives together from a scientific and comparative angle. It looks at how totals are calculated in Power BI and compares that behaviour with Tableau, Excel, Paginated Reports, and even T-SQL. The goal is not to take sides, but to clear up the confusion around what is happening under the hood.

This is a very detailed and dispassionate explanation that helps make sense of the debate.

Leave a Comment