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Day: March 24, 2026

Aggregation on a Filtered Range with SUMIFS()

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson uses a DAX function:

Sometimes the columns have shifted, the totals row isn’t showing up, or the colour coding they used last month is gone.

This is not a pivot table problem, pivot tables are excellent tools! The issue is using them for the wrong job.

If you need to explore data – rotating it, slicing it, asking “what does this look like by region?” – pivot tables are unbeatable.

But if you just need a report that always looks the same, month after month, we really recommend SUMIFS.

Click through to see an example of the function in Excel, though it also works the same way in Power BI.

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Finding SQL Agent Jobs that Start Other Jobs

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

David Plaut is looking for the root cause:

A SQL Server Agent job can start other jobs. Writing jobs this way makes it easy to compartmentalize jobs: start a “child” job only when the “parent” reaches a certain step. Finding these steps can be challenging. There is no field or property in sysjobs or its associated tables to help find child jobs.

Imagine this situation: Job B has started, and you don’t know why. You examine Job B, and it has no schedule. What started Job B?

Read on to learn how you can track down jobs that start other jobs, as well as a recursive lineage of who’s starting whom.

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An Overview of Major FabCon Announcements

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven lays out some of the most important changes:

I am sure you have seen, there has been a lot of Fabric and Power BI news lately. Not surprisingly, Fabric Conference was also last week!

I won’t list all the updates here, you can read Arun’s blog, or either of the Fabric or Power BI monthly feature summary blogs to go through the whole list:

Click through for a dozen or so major changes that Nicky highlights.

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Query Folding and Staging in Fabric Dataflows Gen2

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes digging:

A few years ago I wrote this post on the subject of staging in Fabric Dataflows Gen2. In it I explained what staging is, how you can enable it for a query inside a Dataflow, and discussed the pros and cons of using it. However one thing I never got round to doing until this week is looking at how you can tell if query folding is happening on staged data inside a Dataflow – which turns out to be harder to do than you might think.

Read on to learn more, and also check out the comment describing an alternative approach to part of Chris’s solution.

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What’s New with the Fabric SSIS Preview

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard frames the discussion:

The conversation around SSIS is heating up again.

Some see the signals and conclude SSIS is on the way out. Others point to the strength of the ecosystem and say it is far from done. Both perspectives miss something important.

The introduction of Fabric SSIS public preview does not settle the debate. It reframes it.

I see this as another way of saying, “We know you’re still using SSIS packages but we really don’t want to invest in that any longer, so how about you move it into Fabric until you do finally rewrite things as Fabric Data Pipelines?”

That said, Andy lays out where he sees the current landscape and how there are common issues across Microsoft’s ETL/ELT products, mostly in how people use them.

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