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Month: October 2025

SSMS Query Hint Recommendation Tool

Published 2025-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar tries out a new feature of SQL Server Management Studio:

The maximum tuning time defaults to 300 seconds, but I tacked on a couple zeroes because my slow query already took ~20 seconds to run on its own, and I wanted to give the wizard time to wave his little wand around. The tool actually runs your query repeatedly with different hints, so if you have a 5-minute query, you’ll need to give the tool more time.

Click Start, and it begins running your query with different hints. A couple minutes later, I got:

Brent’s review is quite positive, in a “This is way better than the alternative of doing nothing” sense.

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Monitoring Microsoft Fabric Costs

Published 2025-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb uses a report:

Following on from my blog post a few months ago about cool stuff in the Fabric Toolbox, there is now another really useful solution available there that anyone with Fabric capacities should check out: Fabric Cost Analysis (or FCA). If you have Fabric capacities it’s important to be able to monitor your Azure costs relating to them, so why not monitor your Fabric costs using a solution built using Fabric itself? This is what the folks behind FCA (who include Romain Casteres, author of this very useful blog post on FinOps for Fabric, plus Cédric Dupui, Manel Omani and Antoine Richet) decided to build and share freely with the community.

Click through to see how it works, and check out the FCA link in the graf above to get the code.

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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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Generative Additive Models for Customer Lifetime Value Estimation

Published 2025-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Nicholas Clark builds a GAM:

I typically work in quantitative ecology and molecular epidemiology, where we use statistical models to predict species distributions or disease transmission patterns. Recently though, I had an interesting conversation with a data science PhD student who mentioned they were applying GAMs to predict Customer Lifetime Value at a SaaS startup. This caught my attention because CLV prediction, as it turns out, faces remarkably similar statistical challenges to ecological forecasting: nonlinear relationships that saturate at biological or business limits, hierarchical structures where groups behave differently, and the need to balance model flexibility with interpretability for stakeholders who need to understand why the model makes certain predictions.

This is an interesting article and I had not thought of using a GAM for calculating Customer Lifetime Value. I used a much simpler technique the one time I calculated CLV in earnest. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Generating Gaussian Numbers in SQL Server

Published 2025-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira generates random numbers:

Generating random numbers from a normal distribution is essential for accuracy and realistic modeling, simulation, inference, and algorithm design. This is useful for scientific, engineering, statistical, and AI domains. Let’s see how we can create Box Muller transform functionality in SQL Server without the use of external tools.

I’ve used this technique before in SQL Server and it works really well. Performance is fine and the results approximate a normal distribution like you’d want.

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