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Day: February 26, 2026

Tracking Typing Speed with R

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun is pushing aside Mavis Beacon:

Did you ever wonder how fast and with accuracy your typing is?

For this instance, we will introduce some random pangrams, code samples and random strings sotrted by level of difficulty.

This was kind of fun. I could hit about 80 or so WPM on the easy code examples and about 120 on the pangrams (with consistency between difficulties). Also, “Sphinx of black quartz judge my vow” is a pretty awesome thing to shout at the most opportune time.

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Failure Tracking in SSIS

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword keeps a log:

SSIS packages provide great flexibility for integration between systems, but when they go wrong you can end up digging through logs or reports because every package logs differently. A standarised framework for tracking failures can drastically cut down troubleshooting time.

I reminisced recently about old code, I said “it’s not enough to make it work correctly. It needs to fail correctly too”. So in this post we’ll demonstrate a simple way to consistently track errors and failures in packages to help make troubleshooting much easier.

My recollection is that this kind of failure logging is less important if you have the SSISDB catalog, as it collects a lot of the information as well. But then again, I haven’t really used SSIS in a while, so that memory could be fuzzy.

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Linked Servers in SQL Server 2025 and Strict TLS

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis notes a common failure point:

If you upgrade to SQL Server 2025 and your linked servers stop working, you are not alone. This is the single most common post-upgrade failure I am seeing right now, and it hits almost every environment that has linked servers configured from an older version. SQLNCLI is gone. The replacement driver has different defaults. Your connections will fail unless you explicitly tell them how to encrypt.

Read on for the correct solution, the mostly-correct solution, and the solution that a lot of people will take but will probably burn them in a few years.

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Workspace Operations with MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series:

The workspace is the fundamental unit of organisation in Microsoft Fabric. Everything lives inside a workspace — your lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, pipelines, reports. Managing workspaces is therefore the first practical skill to build, and MicrosoftFabricMgmt makes it straightforward.

Read on for examples covering how to create, update, list, retrieve, or remove workspaces.

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Microsoft Fabric Updates for February 2026

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Katie Murray puts together a list:

This month brings a wide range of enhancements across the Fabric platform—from improvements to the OneLake Catalog and developer experiences, to meaningful updates in Data Engineering, Data Factory, Real‑Time Intelligence, and more. Whether you’re building, operating, or scaling solutions in Fabric, there’s plenty here to explore. And with FabCon just weeks away, February’s updates are a great preview of what’s ahead.

Click through for a big list, though I’d expect the March list to be significantly larger.

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Creating Data from Literals in SQL Server

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson has values. Many, many values:

Row Creators were introduced in SQL Server 2008, and allow you to create multiple rows in a single INSERT statement by using the VALUES clause. In this blog, I will demonstrate a few ways that we have created data in tables, and then show how you can do this with row constructors.

It’s not the only neat trick with VALUES(), either: you can also use CROSS APPLY and VALUES() to perform an efficient unpivot, turning a long virtual table into a wide virtual table.

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