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Day: October 16, 2025

The Downside of Zero-Copy Integration between Kafka and Iceberg

Published 2025-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vanlightly lays out an argument:

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a growing number of posts on social media promoting the idea of a “zero-copy” integration between Apache Kafka and Apache Iceberg. The idea is that Kafka topics could live directly as Iceberg tables. On the surface it sounds efficient: one copy of the data, unified access for both streaming and analytics. But from a systems point of view, I think this is the wrong direction for the Apache Kafka project. In this post, I’ll explain why. 

Read on for an explanation of what “zero-copy” means here, as well as Jack’s position on the matter. I think it’s a solid argument and worth the read.

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Updates to sp_CheckSecurity

Published 2025-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci has been busy:

It’s been a while since we made some improvements to the public version of sp_CheckSecurity, but internally we’ve been busy fine tuning checks and adding even more to discover potential vulnerabilities in your SQL Server instances.

Today we’re announcing a new version that includes additions, corrections, and a few other adjustments that should be helpful. Here’s what new!

Read on to see what has changed.

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Customer-Managed Keys in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Sumiran Tandon makes an announcement:

Customer managed keys were launched in preview, offering workspace administrators the ability to use keys in Azure Key Vault and Managed HSM, to protect data in certain Fabric items. Now, we are extending the encryption support to more Fabric workloads. You can now create Fabric Warehouses, Notebooks and utilize the SQL Analytics Endpoint in workspaces enabled with encryption using your keys. The changes are rolling out and should be available in all regions over the next few days.

Freddie Santos digs into what this means for Fabric Warehouse and the SQL analytics endpoint:

Fabric already ensures that your data is encrypted at rest using Microsoft-managed keys. But for many organizations—especially in regulated industries—encryption alone isn’t enough. They need the ability to control and manage the keys that protect their data, aligning with internal compliance requirements, regulatory standards, and governance best practices.

I know that there are enough companies where this is absolutely necessary for adoption of a product, but I should point out that even without bringing your own key, Microsoft does use their own generated keys to encrypt your data at rest.

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Concatenating String Values in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson plays around with the new string concatenation operator:

I was looking around for stuff to post about the other day, so I read through the latest What’s new in SQL Server 2025 and I found this:

|| (String concatenation) Concatenate expressions with expression || expression.

My interest was piqued to say the least. Using + to concatenate string data has always had its issues, and as much as I love the CONCAT function, it is kind of clunky to use versus a proper operator.

This is part of the ANSI SQL standard, and that standard does specify most of its behavioral patterns. Read on as Louis tries it out in a variety of circumstances.

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Updates to Microsoft Fabric Dataflows Gen2

Published 2025-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic digs into some announcements:

In the ocean of announcements from the recent FabCon Europe in Vienna, one that may have gone under the radar was about the enhancements in performance and cost optimization for Dataflows Gen2.

Before we delve into explaining how these enhancements impact your current Dataflows setup, let’s take a step back and provide a brief overview of Dataflows. For those of you who are new to Microsoft Fabric – a Dataflow Gen2 is the no-code/low-code Fabric item used to extract, transform, and load the data (ETL).

It sounds like these changes move Dataflows Gen2 from the “Never choose this” option to something that has become viable in at least some circumstances.

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