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Day: April 3, 2026

Kafka Topic Management in Amazon MSK

Published 2026-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Swapna Bandla, et al, dig into a managed service:

If you manage Apache Kafka today, you know the effort required to manage topics. Whether you use infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions or perform operations with admin clients, setting up topic management takes valuable time that could be spent on building streaming applications.

Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK) now streamlines topic management by supporting new topic APIs and console integration. You can programmatically create, update, and delete Apache Kafka topics using familiar interfaces including AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), AWS SDKs, and AWS CloudFormation. With these APIs, you can define topic properties such as replication factor and partition count and configuration settings like retention and cleanup policies. The Amazon MSK console integrates these APIs, bringing all topic operations to one place. You can now create or update topics with a few selections using guided defaults while gaining comprehensive visibility into topic configurations, partition-level information, and metrics. You can browse for topics within a cluster, review replication settings and partition counts, and go into individual topics to examine detailed configuration, partition-level information, and metrics. A unified dashboard consolidates partition topics and metrics in one view.

In this post, we show you how to use the new topic management capabilities of Amazon MSK to streamline your Apache Kafka operations. We demonstrate how to manage topics through the console, control access with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and bring topic provisioning into your continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.

Read on to see what the experience looks like using the MSK console.

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Automatic Index Compaction

Published 2026-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis looks at a new Azure SQL Database preview feature:

Microsoft’s announcement of Automatic Index Compaction is titled ‘Stop defragmenting and start living’. That is not an accident. Brent Ozar has been making the case for years that defragmenting indexes is largely maintenance theater — that external fragmentation barely matters on modern SSDs and shared storage and that nightly rebuild jobs hammer your transaction log and I/O for gains that are difficult to measure.

His sessions on the topic have been circulating for over a decade, and now Microsoft’s own documentation states it plainly: ‘For most workloads, a higher index fragmentation doesn’t affect query performance or resource consumption.’ I believe that may be Brent’s argument almost verbatim in their official docs.

This could be interesting.

By the way, if you want a really deep dive on index maintenance, I’ll point back to a pair of sessions Jeff Moden did for TriPASS (the Triangle Area SQL Server User Group that I run) about 5 years back and was gracious enough to let us record. They are very long user group sessions but go into detail on exactly what kinds of index write patterns benefit from rebuilds and which ones don’t, as well as a lot more.

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Building a Health Check with dbatools

Published 2026-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

David Seis has a dashboard:

After a longer break than expected, I am back to the dbatools for SQL Server DBAs blog series, and this one is a monster! In fact, this project is so big that I think it will be better to release it incrementally. This will allow you clone the repository, test and modify it in your own environment and come back for free updates over the weeks/ months to come. It is designed to allow you to customize it to your environment’s needs. This first post will be the initial process overview as well as the first set of checks and how to navigate the report.

Click through to see what David has in store.

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Query Performance Tabs in Performance Monitor

Published 2026-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a new video:

In this video, I dive into the query performance tabs within my full dashboard, a free and open-source SQL Server monitoring tool. I highlight key features such as the QueryStore subtab, which provides detailed insights into query execution plans and regressions over time, helping you identify and address performance issues more effectively. Additionally, I explain how the custom trace patterns tab offers valuable data for safeguarding against overlooked performance anomalies, ensuring a comprehensive view of your SQL Server’s health.

Click through to see these capabilities.

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