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Day: June 3, 2026

Apache Kafka 4.3 Now Available

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mickael Maison makes an announcement:

We are proud to announce the release of Apache Kafka® 4.3. This release contains many new features and improvements. This blog post will highlight some of the more prominent ones. For a full list of changes, be sure to check the release notes.

With 25 KIPs and over 600 commits since 4.2.0, this release introduces many new features, improvements and bug fixes to all the components.

Read on to see what’s new, as well as what’s deprecated in the product.

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Digging into Fabric Apps

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler explains a new capability:

For years, the Power BI community has been clamoring to have native support for visuals-as-code; the ability to create visuals, pages, or even entire dashboards with libraries like Vega, and D3.js. This is now possible in Microsoft Fabric with Fabric Apps, specifically, using a data app.

A Fabric App is a new item type that lets you create and distribute any interactive experiences in Fabric, rather than pre-defined reports, dashboards, and data agents. These are web applications (or webapps). A webapp is any program that runs in a browser (like YouTube, Facebook, or Microsoft Word’s online editor) instead of one that you install on your computer (like Power BI Desktop or Microsoft Word).

Read on to see how you can build Fabric Apps, as well as what they are and aren’t.

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An Introduction to Contained Availability Groups

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse takes us through contained availability groups:

Availability Groups have been one of the best high availability and disaster recovery options in SQL Server for a long time. They let us move a group of user databases together, keep replicas synchronized, offload some read-only workloads, and give applications a listener instead of a single server name.

That works great until the application needs more than just the user databases.

What about the logins? SQL Agent jobs? Permissions? Objects that live in master or msdb? In a traditional Availability Group, those objects are still tied to each SQL Server instance. That means DBAs have to keep them synchronized manually across replicas. Miss one login, job, credential, or permission and the failover might technically succeed while the application still has a very bad day.

Read on to see how contained availability groups can help resolve these problems.

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Finding the Windows Groups for a SQL Server Login

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low looks for an answer:

I saw a question on a SQL Server mailing list about how to determine the Windows groups for a given SQL Server login.

That’s actually easy for a sysadmin login, as they have IMPERSONATE permission for other logins/users.

It does require the ability to impersonate, as Greg mentions. If you don’t have that ability and you’re dealing with an Active Directory user, I could recommend: net user /domain {ActiveDirectoryUserName} in a command prompt to start.

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A First Look at KQL

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword takes a look:

Someone drops a KQL query in your lap and says “you know SQL right?”. Honestly, it’s different enough to trip you up, but similar enough that you’ll pick it up quickly.

In this post I want to touch on what KQL is, why it matters, and show how familiar (or different) it is compared to our beloved SQL.

I’m a pretty big fan of KQL. If you’re at all familiar with Splunk’s querying language, the semantics are quite similar. If you aren’t, Andy provides a comparison to T-SQL.

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Building Automated Tests in Power BI

Published 2026-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

John Kerski has a use for user-defined functions:

Reuse is a very important term in DataOps. It is defined as the practice of leveraging existing components, code, or processes across multiple projects to reduce redundancy and improve consistency.

However, when it comes to Power BI, reusing DAX measures across projects was a difficult ‘copy and paste’ job. For my teams, we used DAX measures to help with testing our semantic models, but ensuring consistent testing conventions (and standard schemas of the tests) required lots of manual review.

Thankfully, that changed in late 2025 when Microsoft introduced User Defined Functions (UDFs) for Power BI. In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use UDFs for testing, plus how to standardize the way teams test their models.

Click through to see how.

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