Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: May 11, 2026

Optimized Locking in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff enables a feature:

Modern SQL Server workloads demand high concurrency without sacrificing consistency. Traditionally, we relied on locking to enforce correctness, but that came with blocking and performance challenges. To resolve some of these issues, row versioning was used to reduce some of that contention overhead. But now with optimized locking in SQL Server 2025, we have a more efficient and scalable concurrency model.

Click through for a demo. My point of curiosity is, what’s the impact in a practical but busy environment? I don’t have one of those running SQL Server 2025, so I do wonder when we’ll get the tell-all post from someone in a very busy environment who has it on. (Or, if we already have and I’ve missed it, please do let me know!)

2 Comments

Microsoft Fabric Eventhouse Caching and Retention

Published 2026-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic notes the ephemeral nature of life:

You spin up your first Eventhouse, ingest some IoT data, fire up a KQL query, and it runs fast. When I say fast, I mean embarrassingly fast. A few weeks later, you query data from a couple of months ago, and… it’s still fast, but maybe a tiny bit slower. A year later, the same query starts to feel sluggish. Two years later, you can’t find some of the data at all.

Welcome to the world of tiered storage in Real-Time Intelligence!

And when Nikola mentions how fast data in hot storage is, that’s no exaggeration. It is, to my knowledge, the fastest way of retrieving data in Microsoft Fabric.

Leave a Comment

Power BI Maximum Allowable Memory Allocation Error

Published 2026-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb continues a series from a few years ago:

This is a very late addition to the series of posts I wrote back in 2024 and which started here on Power BI memory errors. It’s about a very rare error that is hard to deal with and often temporary but since people do run into it from time to time I decided to write about it so there is some useful information available about it online.

The error, which can occur when you refresh a semantic model or render a report, has two associated error messages:

Click through to see those two error messages, as well as a simplified version of the root cause and what you can do.

Leave a Comment

Alternative Storage Engines for PostgreSQL

Published 2026-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Cristophe Pettus puts together a list:

PostgreSQL 12 shipped the table access method API in October 2019, and the community spent the next six years figuring out what to do with it. The early prediction was that within a few releases we would have a thriving ecosystem of pluggable storage engines — columnar for analytics, undo-log for OLTP, in-memory for hot workloads — and the heap would become “the default, not the only choice.”

That is almost what happened. The ecosystem exists. It is thriving in the sense that there are more credible options now than at any point in the project’s history. It is also messier than the early vision implied, more concentrated around a couple of design philosophies than was expected, and littered with the bones of projects that ran out of funding or hit walls in the API itself. Before the next post in this series puts numbers on any of this, it is worth taking stock of what is actually out there, what each project is trying to do, and where the architectural fault lines run.

Click through for a survey of who’s tried what and what’s still around today.

Leave a Comment

T-SQL Snapshot Backups on Hyper-V

Published 2026-05-11 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino takes a backup:

If you’ve been following my T-SQL Snapshot Backup series, you’ve seen this technique work on bare-metal and standard VM deployments where database files live on volumes directly presented to the SQL Server OS. In this post, I’m bringing T-SQL Snapshot Backup into a Hyper-V cluster environment, with database files on VHDXs backed by a Pure Storage FlashArray Cluster Shared Volume (CSV). Hyper-V adds a few extra layers to manage at the hypervisor level, but the SQL Server side of the story is identical. Let’s walk through it.

Click through to see how it all works. It has taken me a long time to accept the idea that storage volume snapshots could fit the bill, and it’s been people like Anthony, Andy Yun, and Mark Wilkinson who have allayed my concerns over the years.

Leave a Comment