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Day: October 12, 2026

Worker Thread Exhaustion and sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint

Published 2026-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Tochon runs out of worker threads:

With SQL Server 2025, Microsoft lets the database engine call an AI model by itself. sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint sends an HTTPS request straight from T-SQL, to Azure OpenAI or to any other REST service, so an embedding or a completion no longer needs application code in between.

But what happens under heavy pressure, when hundreds of sessions make that call at the same moment and the model takes its time to answer? I ran this scenario on SQL Server 2025 and on Azure SQL Database, with the same procedure and the same load script. The two platforms do not react the same way at all.

Click through for three tests, covering SQL Server 2025 with and without Resource Governor, as well as Azure SQL Database.

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Securing Temporary Objects, Metadata Visibility, and Audit Assurance in SQL Server

Published 2026-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Fabiano Amorim hits three topics:

Over the course of this series, I’ve challenged the common assumption that a SQL Server environment is safe simply because it’s patched, firewalled, and configured according to familiar defaults.

I’ve proven that this is not quite true, because real security is not a checkbox. It requires a verification mindset, especially in areas where SQL Server intentionally provides powerful operational features for DBAs, developers, monitoring tools, and application frameworks. 

In this guide, I’ll focus on three features that are easy to underestimate because they look like normal SQL Server behavior. They are global temporary objects, Dynamic Management Views (DMVs), and audit coverage – each a useful feature in their own right.

The other thing they all have in common? They can each become part of an attack chain if granted too broadly, used inside privileged workflows, or trusted without validation. 

Click through for Fabiano’s guidance.

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The Value of Apache Ossie

Published 2026-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Victoria Holt shares some information:

Apache Ossie (incubating) is an industry-wide specification effort to standardize how we exchange semantic metadata across analytics, AI and BI platforms, providing a vendor neutral, single source of truth for semantic data. Ossie was previously known as Open Semantic Interchange (OSI). A semantic model is simply a shared definition of business concepts, metrics and relationships that helps people, reports and AI systems interpret data consistently.

Click through to learn more about Ossie’s intent. There’s still a long way to go, but with all(?) of the major players on board, hopefully we’ll get some good outcomes.

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The TABLESAMPLE Process in Postgres

Published 2026-10-12 by Kevin Feasel

Radim Marek provides an explanation:

At least Postgres avoids flushing its own cache by reading large tables through a small ring buffer. Nevertheless the disk still perform full read. On a primary server handling production traffic is shared with everything else. When all you need is exploratory confirmation “roughly how many” or “are there any representative samples” reading the whole terabyte is too expensive.

SQL Standard comes with TABLESAMPLE to help with that. It goes in the FROM clause right after the table name, and the rest of the query runs against the subset of pages it picks.

Read on to learn more.

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