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Day: February 24, 2026

Architecting Your First Microservice

Published 2026-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Bijoy Choudhury builds a process:

In any microservices migration, extracting services from all their dependencies and point-to-point integrations carries the most risk. If you feel hesitant about decomposing your application, that hesitation is justified. The first service extraction is uniquely challenging because you have to examine years of accumulated technical debt and unresolved organizational decisions at the same time. 

That’s why the objective for the first service extraction should not focus on achieving immediate scalability or to redefine organizational practices but to validate a narrow capability. Instead, it’s about identifying a discrete unit of functionality that can be isolated, deployed independently, and integrated with the existing system without rewriting the entire system or introducing instability.

There’s some good advice in here, as well as one reason why I’m not totally sold on microservices: the isolation of databases. This sounds great until you’re hitting seven different services to retrieve data 100x slower than a simple SQL query would have been because you have complex filtering criteria across these seven services. And then you build an extra layer of caching, introducing even more complexity to solve a problem that never needed to exist.

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Working with Recent Data in Dataflows Gen2

Published 2026-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Penny Zhou sees recent datasets:

How much time do you spend navigating to the same data sources when building dataflows? Data preparation is an iterative process—you often return to the same sources as you refine your dataflows, add new transformations, or create similar workflows. If you find yourself repeatedly connecting to the same tables, files, or databases, the Recent data module in Dataflow Gen2 is designed for you. This feature reduces friction by providing quick access to your most frequently used data items, letting you focus on the transformation logic rather than navigation.

Click through to see how you can access the Recent data menu and what it includes.

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Performance Tuning Dependent SQL Queries in DirectQuery Mode

Published 2026-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb tries a change:

As I described here, Power BI can send SQL queries in parallel in DirectQuery mode and you can see from the Timeline column there is some parallelism happening here – the last two SQL queries generated by the DAX query run at the same time – but everything has to wait for that first SQL query to complete. Why? Can this be tuned?

Click through for an example. I was thinking about how challenging it would be to improve this performance at the SQL query level and if you could build a single query that operates over all three sets of data—distinct customers, distinct customers on Mondays, distinct customers in Januaries–while still performing acceptably. I’m not sure that the variants I sketched out in my head would actually perform faster, thanks to the “distinct” requirements.

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A Primer on Data Storage in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey shares some thoughts:

The whole idea behind a database is the ability to persist the data. You want your inventory of widgets to get stored so you can look at it later. That means writing out to disks. However, what is writing to disk and where is it being written? Unlike SQL Server which has one (or more) big file for all data, PostgreSQL has a collection of a large number of files. There is a methodology and structure to these files that you need to understand in order to later understand how the data gets written to and retrieved from these files.

While we’re going to be very focused on file, page, folder, etc., throughout this article, that’s just part of the physical nature of persisting your data. What is being persisted is still the logical information you’re most interested in – rows and columns. I just wanted to emphasize the distinction between the two here.

Click through to see how PostgreSQL stores information.

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