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Month: January 2026

Hosting an ML Model with FastAPI

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kanwal Mehreen hosts a model:

In this article, you will learn how to package a trained machine learning model behind a clean, well-validated HTTP API using FastAPI, from training to local testing and basic production hardening.

Topics we will cover include:

  • Training, saving, and loading a scikit-learn pipeline for inference
  • Building a FastAPI app with strict input validation via Pydantic
  • Exposing, testing, and hardening a prediction endpoint with health checks

Let’s explore these techniques. 

I definitely enjoy how simple it is to use FastAPI.

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Improvements to Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Dashboards

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Michal Bar makes an announcement:

Performance matters—especially when you’re exploring live data and making decisions in real time. We have released a set of improvements, all aiming to make Real-Time Dashboards faster, smoother, and more responsive, based directly on what our customers and community told us.

Read on to see what has changed.

What hasn’t changed is my complaint about the term “real-time.” But let’s be honest: I realize it’s a war I’m not going to win.

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Misconceptions about Microsoft Certification Exams

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low clears the air:

Over the years, I’ve taken a lot of Microsoft exams. I’ve also spent a lot of time writing exams for Microsoft exam providers. And while I’ve been doing that, I’ve spent a lot of time in forums where I’ve been checking out what people say about the exams. 

What amazes me is the number of misconceptions that people have about these exams. So, I thought it would be helpful to write about the most common ones. Unlike what I see (but shouldn’t see) in the forums, I can’t discuss specific questions, but the majority of this is unrelated to the actual questions or the specific exams. 

Read on to learn more. One thing Greg touches on en passant is quickly-updating information. This is one of the trickiest parts of Microsoft exams, especially in certain fields like AI: sometimes you’ll find a question that was written two versions of a product ago (i.e., 6 months ago) and now you have to guess whether you give the answer that is correct today or the answer that was correct then. I know they try to keep these exams up to date, but it’s hard to do against a moving target.

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Checking SQL Server Availability Groups

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci announces a new procedure:

SQL Server Availability Groups can be a great feature to help support your High Availability needs, but what happens when they fail to work as expected?

Do you have an expiring certificate on used by an endpoint? Do you have timeout settings that could contribute to unexpected failovers? Are you suffering from a high number of HADR_SYNC_COMMIT waits?

We’ve seen all those things happen, and like Marvin Gaye we’ve wondered: what’s going on? And we’ve wanted a tool to help us see if other clients were having these problems, and more.

Read on for more information and check it out yourself.

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Hosting Azure SQL Databases over an Azure VPN

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Aleksey Vitsko doesn’t want public database access:

You have an Azure Point-to-Site (P2S) VPN configured and can successfully connect to your virtual network over VPN. Your SQL resources – such as Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, or SQL Virtual Machine – are hosted within the virtual network. Your goal is to eliminate the use of public endpoints and rely solely on private connectivity.

Click through to see how.

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ALTER TABLE and Partitioned Tables in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chao Li classifies a series of commands:

Does an operation propagate to partitions? Does it affect future partitions? Does ONLY do what it claims? Why do some commands work on parents but not on partitions—or vice versa?

Today, PostgreSQL documentation describes individual ALTER TABLE sub-commands well, but it rarely explains their interaction with partitioned tables as a whole. As a result, users often discover the real behavior only through trial and error.

This post summarizes a systematic investigation of ALTER TABLE behavior on partitioned tables, turning scattered rules into a consistent classification model.

Click through for 15 buckets of commands relating to ALTER TABLE in PostgreSQL and see how they handle dealing with partitioned tables.

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Fun with DATE_BUCKET()

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson tries out a function:

Using this function, you can group data easily into different time buckets, like year, month, day (which are standard enough, of course), but also into buckets like 2 days, 6.4 weeks, etc. Now, I don’t feel like this should ever make you decide that you don’t need a date dimension for you warehouse, but it is great when you are are just checking out data and want to play with different intervals in an easy manner.

Read on to see how it works.

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Microsoft Fabric Copy Job Updates

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ye Xu lays out some changes:

This update introduces several enhancements to native incremental copy and change data capture (CDC) capabilities in Copy job, including support for additional data source stores for incremental copy, expanded CDC support for SAP Datasphere Outbound for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage (in addition to Microsoft Cloud Storage), and Column Mapping support for CDC in Copy job.

Click through to see what has changed in the copy job.

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Dealing with Long-Running I/O Requests in SQL Server

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis has a two-parter. First up is finding instances of long-running I/O Requests:

When diagnosing storage or latency issues, one SQL Server message factors in more than many:

“SQL Server has encountered X occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file…”

Where X might be 1, 5 or 50, and it could list a file from any one of your databases. When you see this, the next good question is when did it happen and where.

And then the question is, what do you do about it? Rebecca provides some guidance:

In a previous post, I shared a script to detect the I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds warning across your SQL Server inventory.  Now let’s talk about what to do when you find it.

Here are five of the most common causes with some tips to investigate each:

The neat part is, it’s not always due to slow storage or bad hardware.

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Lessons Learned from a Trigger

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Pat Wright tells a story:

I haven’t participated in a #TSQL Tuesday in quite some time.  I saw this topic and said, “That’s perfect!”  I love talking about Failure and mistakes!  I have a whole presentation about it, and I’m hoping to make a series of blog posts about it very soon.   

You do not learn from success in life; you learn from failure.  I hope you are making lots of mistakes so that you can learn! 

Read on for a story from Pat around creating a trigger and not realizing the consequences. This is why we don’t let just anybody have mogwais triggers.

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