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Day: January 16, 2026

The Analyst Engineer Role in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley describes a job role:

Analytics Engineer – The DP-600 exam contains elements of both data analytics and data engineering with a business focus. It is the fence-sitter between the disciplined worlds of data engineering and the abstract creativity of analytics. An Analytics Engineer bridges data engineering and analytics by building enterprise-ready solutions in Microsoft Fabric. Combines skills in SQL, DAX, and KQL with expertise in data modeling and performance optimization. They design and manage dataflows, create semantic models, optimize datasets, and ensure governance to deliver curated, analytics-ready data assets for reporting and analysis.

Read on to see how this role fits and some of the things a person performing this role should know and be able to do.

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Thoughts on On-Disk Rowstore in SQL Server

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Kornelis starts a series on storage structures:

When a query is slow, it is often caused by inefficient access to the data. So our tuning work very frequently comes down to figuring out how data was read, and then massaging our queries or database structures to get SQL Server to access the data in a more efficient way.

So we look at scans, seeks, and lookups. We know that scans are good when we access most of the data. Or, in the case of an ordered scan, to prevent having to sort the data. We know that seeks are preferred when there is a filter in the query. And we know that lookups represent a good tradeoff between better performance and too many indexes, but only if the filter is highly selective.

All of the above is true. And all of it is highly generalized. And hence, often, not true enough to be actually useful.

Read on for an overview of the most common option.

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Dealing with a Full Transaction Log

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis performs some troubleshooting:

It’s 2am. Your phone wakes you. Rub your eyes, check your email, and there it is:

Error: 9002, Severity: 17, State: 4
The transaction log for database 'trading' is full due to 'LOG_BACKUP'.

The database is still online. Looks ok. You can read from it. But every INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE fails. Production night-trading is effectively down.

The good news: It’s fixable — but, that fix depends entirely on what’s preventing log truncation.

Click through for a choose-your-own-adventure story.

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Security and High Availability Checklist for Database Application Vendors

Published 2026-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Andreas Wolter has a new version of a checklist:

As a database application vendor, the security and reliability of your software are key competitive differentiators. As a Database Administrator, your priority is ensuring that hosted databases do not expose data or the environment to risk. To support this, we have developed a checklist designed as a blueprint for building secure-by-default, resilient data applications. Following this guidance not only helps you align with ISO 27001 controls but also ensures that your customers can trust your product against the backdrop of a demanding enterprise environment and an evolving threat landscape.

Click through for the list, as well as a PDF version of it. I had a couple of quibbles in my immediate reaction (especially avoiding CLR and triggers), but in fairness, as I thought about whether I’d trust rando vendor XYZ to get it right, I decided that this is good advice.

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