Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: July 14, 2026

Ways to Find a Query Plan

Published 2026-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin has a list:

I’m very excited for this because I’ve wanted to put something together about this topic for a long time.

What inspired me is that I’ve really come to appreciate that there’s different pieces of information collected with the execution plan itself depending on where I get the plan from. Understanding what’s collected, where, and why can help make a difference when trying to troubleshoot and performance tune.

I get most of my query plans from a shady vendor with an unmarked van in a Walmart parking lot.

Leave a Comment

Dealing with linger.ms in Apache Kafka

Published 2026-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Vanlightly covers a common performance optimization:

Recently I was curious to see if there was any general performance improvement since Kafka 3.X. So I ran a suite of benchmarks with Dimster against 3.7.2 and 4.3.0. I saw two common patterns:

Those two patterns involved higher latency for the newer version of Kafka, but better scale. Click through to understand what changed between these two versions that had such a big impact.

Leave a Comment

Applying Different Formatting Rules at Levels of a Hierarchy

Published 2026-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari format things differently:

A challenging requirement in Power BI reports is that of applying different formatting rules based on the level of aggregation. At the year level, the background shade may reflect each year’s share of the grand total. At the quarter level, a status color may indicate whether the quarter is above or below the average. At the month level, the color may flag exceptional values, like months that contribute more than a defined threshold to their year. Each level has its own logic; what the conditional expression of the measure needs to know is which level the current cell belongs to.

Read on to see how you can pull this off.

Leave a Comment

Bad Query Signals

Published 2026-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Mala Mahadevan takes advantage of an extra week:

I just managed to get a post in for this landmark T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Brent Ozar. Brent was kind enough to keep the submission window open for two weeks instead of the usual one, and I was able to sneak a post in last – minute.

His invitation is to write about the things that immediately stand out as “bad signs” when reviewing a SQL query.

Click through for Mala’s list. It’s a good list. While some items Mala calls out are defensible and quite reasonable, there are some of them (such as a LEFT OUTER JOIN whose columns show up in the WHERE clause for filtering) that are simply not.

Leave a Comment

Writing Semantic Model Column and Measure Descriptions

Published 2026-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler shares some thoughts:

In a Power BI semantic model you can set freeform text fields for each object (like tables, columns, and measures) to describe what they do, how to use them, or other information. These descriptions are a convenient and structured way to document each object for developers. They’re also helpful for users, since the descriptions (unlike DAX expressions) show when you hover on the object in Power BI Desktop:

Click through to see what Kurt recommends in terms of items that should go into a description, as well as things that do not belong there. Kurt also has some strong ideas around AI-generated descriptions and what makes a description relatively more useful for a person versus a language model.

Leave a Comment

A Primer on Database States

Published 2026-07-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci lays out the list:

I’ve recently been asked by some folks about different states for SQL Server databases. Questions like “what’s the state of a database with log shipping?”,  “can I fix a database in (whatever) state with a restart?”,  and “which is the bad one, RECOVERY or RECOVERY PENDING?”

Hopefully you don’t have to try to figure out if your database is in a bad way or not because of an unusual state, but I presume when you do you will need to know as soon as possible. So, I’ve put this handy list of possible database states together to help you in your moment of need.

Click through for the full set.

Leave a Comment