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Day: December 30, 2025

Top Microsoft Fabric Features from 2025

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic builds an end of year list:

Microsoft Fabric just turned two a couple of weeks ago (at Ignite in November, to be more precise). As the product is still very much a “work in progress”, we have overseen literally hundreds of new features in the last 365 days. Obviously, not all of them are equally important – some were simply trying to fix the obvious issues in the existing workloads, or trying to catch up either with competitors or with some functionalities we had in the older Microsoft data platform solutions, whereas the others were targeting super niche use cases.

Therefore, in this article, I’ll try to distill what I consider the biggest announcements around Microsoft Fabric in 2025.

Read on for three caveats, followed by the list and quite a few additional nominees.

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Blogging for Programmers

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson has wrapped up a series of videos:

Today I finished up my first 24 videos in my Blogging for Programmers series of posts. I started out calling it vlogmas, but Tipmas definitely fits a lot better.

You can access the blogs about them here or go directly to the Youtube playlist here.
It was a lot of fun to do this series, and more will be coming in the new year at a much slower pace. I hope you enjoyed the series and/or learned something. The blogs each have a succinct version of the list of tips, so if you don’t have 5 – 10 minutes to watch a video, the main points are listed there.

If you’re interested in blogging, Louis has a lot of great tips across the 24 videos.

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Vectors and Columnstore Indexes

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer continues a series on columnstore indexes:

In this post we are going to test one of the more promising technologies in SQL Server-based offerings – Vector data types and its relationship with the Columnstore Indexes. The tests I am running right now are executed against SQL Server 2025 RTM, the latest and greatest SQL Server version available to customers. Given that some parts of the SQL Server 2025 were delivered as a Preview Features, the current situation might change in the future for SQL Server 2025 (at least, Half-precision float support should evolve into the fully supported feature, in my opinion). At very least, I do expect reasonably fast evolution of the space on Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance.

This seems like more pain than joy, which is the unfortunate reality of v1 features in SQL Server anymore.

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A Look at Fabric IQ

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some thoughts on Fabric IQ:

At Ignite in November, 2025, Microsoft introduced Fabric IQ. I noted to go beyond the marketing hype and check if Fabric IQ makes any sense. The next thing I know, around the holidays I’m talking to an enterprise strategy manager from an airline company and McKinsey consultant about ontologies.

Ontology – A branch of philosophy, ontology is the study of being that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. In computer science and AI, ontology refers to a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

So, what better way to spend the holidays than to play with new shaky software?

Read on for Teo’s standard format of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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Investigating Hash Match Spills to tempdb

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis digs in when you’re overdrawn at the memory bank:

Finding data in tempdb is hard. Not when the data is in objects we created ourselves, such as temporary tables or variables. They are stored in the internal system tables and reflected in various system dynamic management views. But that changes for internal objects. They are only used by the internal logic of, in this case, the Hash Match operator. There is no advantage to storing them in the system tables. When I explored the internals of tables used by Table Spool, Index Spool, and Window Spool, I found out that Microsoft has indeed not bothered to put anything in the system tables for such internal objects. The Hash Match operator is not different in this regard.

But I still found a way to locate this information.

Hugo explains how, though it does include some contrivances to make life a lot easier. I always love this sort of spelunking deep into the bowels of how things work, and Hugo is definitely on the top shelf when it comes to this kind of work.

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