A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Sebastiao Pereira approximates an integral in T-SQL:
The Newton-Cotes formulas are a useful and straightforward family of numerical integration, which is the approximate computation of an integral using numerical techniques. The numerical computation of an integral is also called quadrature. How can we build these formulas in SQL Server without using external tools?
Click through to see how it all works.
Leave a CommentDeborah Melkin takes a look at the state of notebooks in the Microsoft ecosystem:
Azure Data Studio, as some of you know, has now been deprecated. That came out a while ago and the official deprecation was, I think, a couple months ago at this point. It’s all a blur, but needless to say, no more Azure Data Studio. I had gotten an email from someone who said they saw my presentation and they’d love to see more about it, especially with VS Code. Because there was an extension in VS Code for notebooks, and particularly something called .NET Interactive, which are polyglot notebooks, polyglot multi-language. All right, that was really cool and I had started addressing that, too, because it had just been introduced. It’s a really cool concept.
And then before I had a chance to put it together, new notice from Microsoft. Guess what’s being deprecated?
You guessed it. .NET Interactive notebooks. They went bye-bye. Great.
But wait, I hear SQL Notebook’s theme music?
Leave a CommentUser Defined Functions (UDFs) are, in my opinion, the biggest update to Power BI Desktop since PBIP.
That may sound dramatic, but if you care about DataOps, semantic model quality, and reusable development patterns, UDFs fundamentally change what is possible with DAX.
Reuse is one of the core principles of DataOps. For years we have been able to build reusable patterns in Power Query, PowerShell, Python, YAML, and infrastructure automation. But DAX was always missing a key capability: reusable logic that could live inside the semantic model itself.
Until now.
Read on to learn more, as well as to get a link to John’s PQL.Assert DAX unit testing library.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:
A good week ago I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday blog party. I invited the community the blog about the idea of what would happen if we would need to go back on-premises, after a good decade of cloud computing. What would you need to do? How do you plan for this? What are the skills you might need to (re-)learn? You can find my take on this here, where I’m telling my junior colleagues that troubleshooting issues on-prem is more challenging, because it’s possible you need to go way down, all the way to Kerberos, SAN and DNS issues.
Click through for the contributions.
Leave a CommentTim Radney proffers some advice:
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen the same patterns repeat: nightly index maintenance jobs running for hours, consuming massive CPU and I/O, only for performance to remain inconsistent or even degrade in some cases. Many of us (myself included, early in my career) relied heavily on avg_fragmentation_in_percent from sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats to decide when to reorganize or rebuild indexes. It’s time we move past that outdated approach and stop just doing what we’ve always done.
One thing I would add on to Tim’s advice is, determine whether that index even needs rebuilt or if you’re burning resources for no practical benefit. If there’s no practical performance benefit from the operation—and with all-flash arrays that are within an order of magnitude of RAM speeds, you might already be close to that point—then the index rebuild is for naught. The index maintenance strategy that we all learned back in the day was to minimize the time we spent waiting for spinning disks to reach relevant data. When random access lookups are approximately the same speed as sequential lookups, position on the disk doesn’t matter all that much.
Leave a CommentTaiob Ali wants to use Entra for authentication:
During the livestream of my session at the POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026 conference, I received the following question on the hallway track via Discord:
I have one question : I added an Entra group as PostgreSQL Entra administrator, created/mapped the PostgreSQL role for that group, and granted permissions to that group. I am a member of the Entra group, but I still cannot log in with my own Entra user. Does Azure PostgreSQL allow group members to authenticate through the group role, or must each user also be individually created/mapped as a PostgreSQL role?
Read on for Taiob’s full answer.
Leave a CommentJames Serra puts together a list:
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and AI, and some were very impressive. Below are my favorites. I am prioritizing the data announcements first, because that is where my brain naturally goes (and because AI without good data is just a very confident intern with access to a keyboard).
The biggest announcements across Microsoft Fabric and databases can be found in the Microsoft Build 2026: Building agentic apps with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Databases blog post.
This looks like another year of Fabric + AI as the (almost) entire data platform focus at Build.
Leave a CommentJens Vestergaard digs into a security challenge:
In the last post I walked through auditing a semantic model before connecting it to an AI tool like Fabric Data Agent. Descriptions, naming, explicit measures, star schema: the things that decide whether a Fabric data agent generates an accurate query or a confident wrong one. I left one thing out on purpose, because it deserved its own post and because I got it wrong the first time I thought about it.
Security.
Click through for a few subtle security issues that automated agents can expose. It turns out to be a lot more challenging than you may first expect, just as Jens discovered.
Leave a CommentHugo Kornelis continues a series on storage structures:
After covering on-disk rowstore, columnstore indexes, memory-optimized storage, and memory-optimized columnstores, it is now time to turn our attention to storage structures that are used for specific datatypes only. The first “victim” will be the XML index.
When you need to store XML data in a SQL Server database, you can choose between two data types, each with their pros and cons. You can choose to store the XML data as nvarchar(max). This preserves the exact content of the XML as you received it, which might be required for legal reasons. However, any query that cares about the specific content of the XML data will have to resort to very complicated string expressions.
The xml data type shreds the XML and stores the content in an internal format, that allows SQL Server to work with for instance XQuery or XPath expressions. This format also saves space as compared to the nvarchar(max) alternative. However, when you query the data, the content will be the same, but formatting and whitespace might be different.
The latter also allow you to build indexes on top of them, and those indexes are what Hugo covers.
Leave a CommentRonald Kraijesteijn tells a tale of woe with Power BI Report Server:
The setup is an on-prem Power BI Report Server, fully patched, running the May 2026 release (
1.26.9637.31070, build15.0.1121.109). I had a report I needed to publish, but first I had to swap a whole batch of connection strings. Doing that by hand in Desktop is miserable, so I took a shortcut that turned out to be the root of all my pain. More on that below.
The error was a generic mess and the cause was getting too high for your station and actually expecting something from Power BI Report Server.
I say this as a fellow long-time Power BI Report Server sufferer.
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