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Day: December 19, 2025

Draw Economist-Style Graphs in R

Ozancan Ozdemir replicates a style:

I think everyone agrees on the fact that the Economist magazine produces very-well designed graphics, sometimes the best in the world. The success behind their graph lies on the ability of explaining complex matters in a simpler way by employing traditional data visualization techniques such as line graph or bar plot. They put emphasis on the message they want to convey rather than the aesthetics of the graph itself. They also have a clear hiearchy in their plots and use colors, fonts and lines which represents the brand identity of the magazine.

In this tutorial, we are going to create an Economist-style graph in R by using ggplot2ggthemesshowtextggtextand grid packages. I am going to use a dataset that I have been collecting since 2014 about the poverty line and minimum wage in Turkey, but you can adopt these codes to any dataset you want to visualize.

Click through to learn how.

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DATE_BUCKET() Now GA in Fabric Data Warehouse

Jovan Popovic makes an announcement:

We have introduced a new DATE_BUCKET() function in Fabric Data Warehouse SQL language that makes reporting and analytics even easier.

In this blog post, you’ll discover how it simplifies time-based reporting and makes grouping dates effortless.

My experience is that DATE_BUCKET() takes a bit of effort getting used to, as it is not an intuitive function. That said, it can be really powerful for dealing with time series data. It is also available in SQL Server, as of SQL Server 2022.

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Measuring Promotion Impact in Power BI

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari take us through a scenario:

Marketing campaigns drive sales, but not all sales can be directly attributed to a specific campaign. A customer might see a promotion and later purchase the product without using any discount code or campaign link. How do you measure this broader influence? This article presents data modeling and DAX measures to analyze campaign effectiveness by separating attributed sales (transactions for which we can clearly identify the one campaign that generated the sale) from influenced sales (all sales of products participating in one or more campaigns, regardless of whether the sale can be attributed to one exact campaign). The solution includes several measures using a many-to-many relationship between products and campaigns, combined with dynamic CROSSFILTER manipulation, to provide a complete view of the campaign’s impact.

Read on to see how you can use DAX capabilities to build attribution measures.

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Optimized Locking in SQL Server 2025

Tomaz Kastrun continues an advent of SQL Server 2025:

Optimized locking is a new feature in SQL Server 2025. It helps to reduce lock memory as very few locks are held even for large transactions. In addition, optimized locking avoids lock escalations and can avoid certain types of deadlocks. This allows more concurrent access to the table.

Read on to understand what its purpose is and see a demo of it in action.

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The Year in SQL

Anna Hoffman writes up the year in SQL:

For the FIFTH(!!) year in a row (my heart is warm with the number, I love SQL and #SQLfamily, and time is flying), I am sharing my annual Year in Review blog with all the SQL Server, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric news this year. Of course, you can catch weekly episodes related to what’s new and diving deeper on the Azure SQL YouTube channel (this blog post was livestreamed there too). This year, in addition to Data Exposed (52 new episodes and over 70K views!), we saw many new series related to areas like GitHub Copilot, SSMS, VS Code, and Azure SQL Managed Instance land in the channel, in addition to Data Exposed.

Click through for plenty of links around SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL, and Fabric SQL Database.

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