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Day: November 17, 2025

DACPAC Deployment Misleading Entra ID Error

Koen Verbeeck troubleshoots an issue:

While deploying a DACPAC (from a SQL Server Data Tools Database Project) through Azure Devops, I got the following error message:

The user attempting to perform this operation does not have permission as it is currently logged in as a member of an Azure Active Directory (AAD) group but does not have an associated database user account. A user account is necessary when creating an object to assign ownership of that object. To resolve this error, either create an Azure AD user from external provider, or alter the AAD group to assign the DEFAULT_SCHEMA as dbo, then rerun the statement.

Read on to see what happened in Koen’s case. This is an example of a generic error message hiding relevant information from us.

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Using the OKVIZ Synoptic Panel for Ticket Sales Data

Victor Rivas visualizes some sales data:

This use case demonstrates the powerful capability of Synoptic Panel to analyze and visualize spatial data at large venues like The Sphere in Las Vegas, which seats 9,205 people. The study addresses the challenge of visualizing over 1 million ticket sales records from 200 events, including concerts and conferences, to gain insights into revenue and average occupancy percentage across different seating categories, sectors, and individual seats.

The objective is to demonstrate how spatial data visualization helps stakeholders understand revenue distribution and audience behavior related to seating arrangements, enabling more informed decision-making.

Click through for the case study. H/T Marco Russo.

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Refactoring Code Segments in SQL

Lee Asher performs refactoring:

Over time the term “refactoring” has expanded and is sometimes used to mean code quality improvement in general, but here we are using it with its original meaning: condensing and eliminating redundant segments of code. Like factoring a number in math, we break the code into smaller blocks, identify any repeated elements, then replace them with a single reference.

I appreciate that Lee is sticking to the original meaning of the term here. Interestingly, Lee doesn’t cover T-SQL functions at all. On net, that’s probably a good thing, especially scalar functions. It’s easy to find cases where converting a function to an inline call can speed up query performance by 3x or more.

The mechanisms Lee does use could have an impact on query performance, especially lateral join/APPLY. But for some of these, as long as you do not overuse the technique, performance will be pretty similar.

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Parallel Performance and SSMS Outputs

Joe Obbish looks at some execution plans:

Getting back to the query, it doesn’t look that offensive to me. The row mode sort is a parallel top N sort and the overall number of rows to return is low, so each thread can independently sort its rows and return 1000 locally sorted rows to the parent operator. This is about as good as it gets with parallel row mode sorting. This is a row mode only query so the operator times that you see are the sum of that operator’s work and its children. In terms of real work done by the query, the scan clocks in at 1.168 seconds and the sort clocks in at 0.84 seconds. The final accounting at the end by the parent Parallelism (Gather Streams) is misleading at best and an outright LIE at worst. There wasn’t 4 seconds of work done by this query. There was only 2 seconds. 

Joe looks at two separate things in this post: first, a way of trying to optimize OFFSET/FETCH style paging queries; and second, how the gather streams parallel operator can report wrong information.

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