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Day: April 13, 2026

Don’t Use FLOAT for Currency Data

Published 2026-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea has a public service announcement:

In this post I provide some examples as to why FLOAT isn’t the best option for storing exact financial data in SQL Server.

During the last couple of years I’ve seen quite a few cases of FLOAT being used to store financial data in SQL Server.
This isn’t ideal due to how the FLOAT data type behaves in SQL Server, and the official documentation makes a clear note of that.

I’m crotchety enough about this to say that you shouldn’t use any sort of decimal data type (DECIMAL, MONEY, etc.) when dealing with currency data in important financial contexts, either. I reach for BIGINT and divide by 100 (or 10,000 if you keep to four spots after the decimal) for the presentation layer.

For cases in which my data isn’t the source system of record for financial transactions, DECIMAL is fine. I don’t generally like MONEY as a data type in any circumstance, to be honest.

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Unit Testing DAX via Semantic Link

Published 2026-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard writes a test:

Every BI developer has felt it. You change a measure, update a relationship, or rename a column in a semantic model, and then you spend the next hour clicking through report pages to check if something broke. Manual spot-checking is how most teams validate DAX today. It works until it does not.

I have been building and maintaining semantic models for years. The further I get into Fabric-based development, the more my models start to feel like production code. They power dashboards that drive decisions. They feed downstream pipelines. When something breaks, the blast radius is real. And yet, the testing story has always been: deploy, open the report, squint at the numbers.

That gap bothered me enough to do something about it.

Click through to see what Jens has done.

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Write Storms and PostgreSQL

Published 2026-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Shaun Thomas talks checkpoints:

Every database has to reconcile two uncomfortable truths: memory is fast but volatile, and disk is slow but durable. Postgres handles this tension through its Write-Ahead Log (WAL), which records every change before it happens. But the WAL can’t grow forever. At some point, Postgres needs to flush all those accumulated dirty pages to disk and declare a clean starting point. That process is called a checkpoint, and when it goes wrong, it can bring throughput to its knees.

One thing I would note is that direct-attached nVME storage is approximately 1 order of magnitude slower than RAM. Yeah, that’s still a lot slower, but the gap has closed significantly. If you have PCIe 5 nVME drives (call that 12-14 GB/sec) and relatively slow RAM (20 GB/sec), it’s getting close to on par. But once you move past the top-of-the-line for disk speed, you add more orders of magnitude and everything Shaun describes becomes a problem again.

Jeremy Schneider offers a follow-up involving autovacuum_cost_delay:

A few days ago, Shaun Thomas published an article over on the pgEdge blog called [Checkpoints, Write Storms, and You]. Sadly a lot of corporate blogs don’t have comment functionality anymore. I left a few comments [on LinkedIn], but overall let me say this article is a great read, and I’m always happy to see someone dive into an important and overlooked topic, present a good technical description, and include real test results to illustrate the details.

I don’t have any reproducible real test results today. But I have a good story and a little real data.

Check out both of those articles.

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Defaulting Power BI Slicers to the Current Month

Published 2026-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria fixes an annoyance:

There is currently no way to set a default value in a Power BI slicer visual. If you create a report with a slicer for month and choose the current month (e.g. April 2026), save the report, and then come back to the report a month later, your original selection will be enforced and the data will now show the prior month. So how do you make reports with slicers show data for the current month by default while allowing users to select other months as needed? This video shows 3 options.

Click through for the video, as well as seeing which of the three is Meagan’s preferred route.

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Third-Party Semantic Model (Lack of) Support in Power BI

Published 2026-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb lays out an explanation:

I’ve been working with Microsoft BI tools for 28 years now and for all that time Microsoft has been consistent in its belief that semantic models are a good thing. Fashions have changed and at different times the wider BI industry has agreed and disagreed with this belief; right now, semantic models are cool again because everyone has realised how important they are for AI. As a result, some of Microsoft’s partners and competitors (and sometimes it’s not clear which is which) have invested in building their own semantic models and/or metrics stores, some of which don’t work at all with Power BI and some of which only work with significant limitations. This naturally raises the question of whether Power BI will ever work properly with them. The answer is no, and in this blog post I’ll explain why.

Read on for Chris’s explanation.

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SQL Server Kubernetes Operator

Published 2026-04-13 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino shares a new project:

Are you considering replatforming your SQL Server workload due to recent vendor changes, but still need high availability and disaster recovery? You’re not alone. One of the challenges with running SQL Server on Kubernetes is that there’s no Kubernetes operator available. That means no automated lifecycle management, no automatic failover, and no standard way to bootstrap an Always On Availability Group on Kubernetes.

I’m excited to share it today as an open-source project: sql-on-k8s-operator. Let’s go.

Click through to see what it entails. All in all, that’s really cool.

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