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Day: August 3, 2026

The Medallion Architecture’s Silver Layer: Physical or Virtual?

Nikola Ilic noodles a concept:

If you’ve been working with data platforms in recent years, chances are that you’ve implemented the medallion design pattern (or architecture:)) at least once. Bronze, silver, gold – raw, cleansed, curated – this design pattern has become so widely adopted that you’ll find it in every reference architecture, every certification exam, and every conference talk (including some of mine, I have to admit). And, in the vast majority of implementations I’ve seen (and built myself), all three layers are physically materialized as tables.

In this article, I’d like to challenge that habit. Not the medallion pattern itself – the logical separation of layers is, in my opinion, still of paramount importance. What I want to question is something much more specific: why is the silver layer a set of physical tables? And, with the recent announcement of GPU acceleration for the Fabric Data Warehouse, I believe this question deserves a serious answer, rather than “because that’s how the diagram looks”

Click through for Nikola’s thoughts, including when it might work for the silver layer to be virtual and when it doesn’t make sense.

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TempDB as a Denial of Service Vector

Emad Al-Mousa describes a denial of service mechanism:

Denial of service attack is one of the common cyber security attacks that will cause interruption, outage and potentical finanicial and operational damages. So, its very nasty attack that attackers use for damage intent.

The main problem here is that any sql server database login (user) can create temporary tables in TEMPDB database and no specific permission is required to be granted to this account in the first place. Also, there is no way (I am currently aware off) that restricts a database login from temporary tables creation.

Prior to SQL Server 2025, I’m not sure of a great way to prevent this attack, assuming the attacker has access to run arbitrary queries against your instance.

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Setting up Azure SQL DB in Podman

Vlad Drumea builds a local version of Azure SQL Database:

Microsoft has recently released in private preview (at the time of writing) the Azure SQL Database container image.
This is Microsoft’s solution for folks who want to build and test Azure SQL DB native software without having to incur additional Azure costs just for dev/test/demo work.

This provides a local option for developers who want to work on products that require Azure SQL DB’s specific developer surface: T-SQL, drivers, and engine behavior.

Click through to see how this works. As of right now, you’ll need to be in the private preview, but I imagine things won’t change significantly once they move to public preview.

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Source Control and Branching in Microsoft Fabric

Jon Lunn has a series with the first two parts up. First up is part one:

Developing in Microsoft Fabric within a multi-team environment has not always been straightforward. Fabric was initially geared more towards individual users and citizen developers working independently within a workspace, which created challenges when applying traditional source control and DevOps practices.

Part two covers integration with Azure DevOps:

Now we’re going to look at deploying Fabric items through DevOps using the Microsoft-supported Fabric CI/CD Python library.

  • Set up DevOps components
    • Environments
    • Libraries
  • Creating an DevOps YAML deployment pipeline
  • Creating a Fabric CI/CD script to deploy the items
  • Using AI Tools to help speed up development of DevOps

Stay tuned for part three.

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