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Day: October 24, 2025

OneLake Security and the Fabric SQL Analytics Endpoint

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Freddy Santos takes us through the latest with respect to security in OneLake:

OneLake Security centralizes fine-grained data access for Microsoft Fabric data items and enforces it consistently across engines.
Currently in Preview and opt-in per item, it lets you define roles over tables or folders and optionally add Row-Level Security (RLS) and Column-Level Security (CLS) policies. These definitions govern what users can see across Fabric experiences.

Read on to see what you can do.

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Custom Calendars in Power BI

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion needs a calendar dimension:

Before September 2025, there was a complex workaround to create time intelligence calculations in DAX catered to different calendar types apart from the standard Gregorian calendar. With the Power BI September 2025 feature updates (still in preview at the time of writing), it is now readily possible to define custom Power BI custom calendars based time intelligence, like Shifted Gregorian, ISO, and retail calendars, in the data model and then use the new extended DAX functions against these calendars.

The new feature eliminates the need for complex workarounds and ensures cleaner and more accurate reporting for organizations. This tip will explain the different calendars used in time intelligence reporting and how to define them based on the new calendar-based time intelligence capability in Power BI.

Read on for several examples of how this works.

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PostGIS Tuning via pg_stat_statements

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Ramsey wants to make spatial querying faster:

A reasonable question to ask, if you are managing a system with variable performance is: “what queries on my system are running slowly?”

Fortunately, PostgreSQL includes an extension called “pg_stat_statements” that tracks query performance over time and maintains a list of high cost queries.

This particular post is more about pg_stat_statements in general rather than specific advice for PostGIS, but it does lay out some recommendations for using pg_stat_statements in spatial-heavy environments.

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Microsoft Fabric Direct Lake Join Index Creation

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Phil Seamark explains a recent change:

If you’ve been working with Direct Lake in Microsoft Fabric, you’ll know its magic resides in its ability to quickly load data. It loads data into semantic models from OneLake when needed. This feature eliminates the overhead of importing. But until recently, the first query on a cold cache might feel sluggish. Why? One reason for this is that Direct Lake must build a join index. This index is added to the model during the first query. This index is a critical structure that maps relationships between tables for efficient lookups.

Earlier, this process was single-threaded and slow, especially on large tables with high cardinality. The good news? That’s changed.

Read on to see how, what a join index is, and what this impact looks like in practice.

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Learning Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk picks up a new skill:

If you are reading this article on my website, chances are you know me from my Power BI content, the videos, articles, tutorials, or downloads, or you came across it on LinkedIn. I want to be upfront: I am a front-end/business person. I create reports that lead to action and help businesses make smarter decisions while building a data-driven strategy.

When I started talking about Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, people were surprised. Some were curious. Others probably wondered what had happened. For me, real-time reports push you to approach design in a completely different way because users need to take action immediately. Decisions happen in the moment, and that changes everything about how you visualize and structure information, so that got me interested!

Read on to see how Valerie picked up KQL as a language, as well as some of the challenges involved. I will say, the Eventhouse is also the fastest mechanism Microsoft has to query large amounts of data in Microsoft Fabric—it beats out the lakehouse and warehouse pretty handily.

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Breaking Changes in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis goes over the list:

Every new SQL Server release comes with shiny features — but SQL Server 2025 brings more than just enhancements. It’s important to know that there are several breaking changes under the hood that could futz your upgrade if you’re not paying attention.

On the whole, it’s a pretty small list but there are a few things on here that could affect any given environment.

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