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Day: April 23, 2026

Maestro Now 1.1.0

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Will Hipson lays out an update:

maestro has officially graduated to stable release with version 1.0.0 back in January 2026 and now its latest version 1.1.0. This marks a commitment to maintaining a stable API and increased reliance on using maestro in production. In our environment alone, maestro has orchestrated millions of pipeline executions over the course of a year, effectively making it the heartbeat of our entire data stack.

If you haven’t heard of maestro, it’s a pipeline orchestration package. You can learn more about it here.

Click through to see what’s changed between the 1.0.0 release and now. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Zero-Shot Text Classification in Python

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Abid Ali Awan doesn’t have time to train:

In this article, you will learn how zero-shot text classification works and how to apply it using a pretrained transformer model.

Topics we will cover include:

  • The core idea behind zero-shot classification and how it reframes labeling as a reasoning task.
  • How to use a pretrained model to classify text without task-specific training data.
  • Practical techniques such as multi-label classification and hypothesis template tuning.

This typically works best when the set of classes is quite distinct and limited in number. Once you get past several classes, the likelihood of spurious results increases considerably and that’s when you’re back to model training/fine-tuning based off of sufficient quantities of labeled data.

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Using Change Event Streaming for Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Analytics

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Xu Jiang and Nikola Zagorac take a look at Change Event Streaming:

Traditionally, Change Data Capture (CDC) has been the go-to mechanism for tracking SQL Server data changes. However, CDC relies on polling-based capture with intermediate change tables, introducing latency and operational overhead, such as managing polling, offsets, and replaying windows in connector. Change Event Streaming (CES), introduced in SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance, takes a fundamentally different approach: it pushes data change events directly from the database engine to external streaming platforms in real time. Built on the CloudEvents specification, CES delivers structured JSON messages with the operation type and full row data – eliminating intermediate tables and reducing end-to-end latency to near zero.

Click through for more information, though Change Event Streaming is still officially a preview feature in SQL Server 2025

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Using the Dedicated Admin Connection in SQL Server

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley forces down the door:

It’s 2 AM. Your phone is going off. Users can’t connect to the application, and when you open SSMS to investigate, the connection spinner just keeps spinning. SQL Server is alive; you can see the process running, but it’s too overwhelmed to let you in. You need to get in there and kill something, but you can’t get a connection to do it. This is exactly the scenario the Dedicated Admin Connection DAC was built for. And if you haven’t set it up yet, now is the time. Because when you need it, you really need it.

Because there is a preparatory step, it’s important to run that while the instance is in a healthy state. That way, it’ll be available to you when the instance is at the edge of failure.

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SQL ConstantCare Report for Spring 2026

Published 2026-04-23 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar provides an update:

SQL Server 2025’s 1% adoption rate might sound small, but it mirrors the adoption rate curves of 2019 and 2022 when those releases came out. It took 2019 a year to break 10% adoption, and it took 2022 a year and a half. I’ve grouped together 2014 & prior versions because they’re all unsupported, and 2016 will join them quickly in July when it goes out of extended support. (I can’t believe it’s been almost 10 years already!) Here’s how adoption is trending over time, with the most recent data at the right:

Standard statements about how this is a biased (in the statistical sense) sample apply. Standard statements about how I am appreciative that Brent shares this information because I don’t know of anyone else who consistently does give out this level of info also apply.

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