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Day: January 12, 2026

Using REGEXP_LIKE in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover dives in:

Microsoft added several new features in SQL Server 2025, including an exciting suite of regular expression (regex) functions. After years of anticipation, there’s no longer a need to rely on CLR to use regex capabilities. As an experienced SQL developer, I enjoy finding specific rows, and the function that stands out to me is REGEXP_LIKE. I was drawn to it by its name, mainly because I frequently use the LIKE predicate. Right now, we are deciding whether to use it.

Read on for the results of Jared’s testing.

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Two Ways of Using Source Control

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Seemann notes that there are two very different approaches to source control:

Git is such a versatile tool that when discussing it, interlocutors may often talk past each other. One person’s use is so different from the way the next person uses it that every discussion is fraught with risk of misunderstandings. This happens to me a lot, because I use Git in two radically different ways, depending on context.

Should you rebase? Merge? Squash? Cherry-pick?

Often, being more explicit about a context can help address confusion.

I know of at least two ways of using Git that differ so much from each other that I think we may term them two different regimes. The rules I follow in one regime don’t all apply in the other, and vice versa.

Click through for depictions of both methods and how they differ.

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Accessing a Variable Library from a Microsoft Fabric Notebook

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Graham-Brown continues a series on variable libraries in Microsoft Fabric:

This post walks through how to access a variable library in a notebook in Microsoft Fabric. I recommend a Microsoft Fabric project starts by creating a variable library to store the common values different artifacts need and could be changed if a deployment pipeline gets involved. So when we create a notebook we need to be able to use these variables. This means we need load the variable library in a notebook and then get the variable values.

Read on for two ways to retrieve information on variables, as well as some recommendations around naming.

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Performance Analysis of Geocoding in Power BI

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb grabs the map and pushpins:

When a user complains about their Power BI report being slow it’s normal for the developer to open up DAX Studio and start tuning the measures in the semantic model because 95% of the time the problem is the DAX. But there’s a whole class of report performance problems that are nothing to do with the semantic model or DAX and they are the ones that are much easier to troubleshoot now that Performance Analyzer is available in the browser as well as Desktop. Today I want to look at one of them: geocoding in map visuals.

Click through for a demonstration and a few tips to help limit the pain of geocoding large amounts of data.

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Resource Governor tempdb Limits and Query Spills

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little performs a test:

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new Resource Governor capability to manage tempdb usage, along with making Resource Governor available in Standard Edition.

I wondered: can Resource Governor’s new tempdb feature help contain queries that don’t use temporary tables, but which spill massive amounts of data to tempdb? The docs say yes, but I always like to get hands-on experience when I can.

I’ve got an awful query that spills like a soft-serve machine choosing violence. Let’s test drive the new tempdb governance features in SQL Server 2025.

Read on to see whether this actually works and how it behaves.

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