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Day: October 13, 2026

Using Screencast Mode in VSCode

Published 2026-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Robbins shares some good advice:

If you’ve ever watched a live demo where the presenter says “I’ll just run this” and code appears out of nowhere, you know how easy it is to lose the audience. They can’t see which keys you pressed, which command you ran, or where you clicked. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) has a built-in feature that solves this problem: screencast mode.

I learned about screencast mode from Steven Judd while we were teaching PowerShell together in the OnRamp program.

It’s easy enough to turn on before demos and off after the presentation. Between that and Ctrl +/- to zoom in and out, Visual Studio Code is very convenient for demonstrations.

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SQL Server 2017 Has One Year of Support Remaining

Published 2026-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar provides a reminder:

Even if you can knock out one of these per month on every 2017 & prior instance that you have, you’re still gonna be banging up against the October 12, 2027 deadline.

It’s not like your servers will magically stop working on that date – but if your company’s insurance or compliance rules say you’re not allowed to run out-of-date software, then it might be your butt on the line for not getting onto a supported version. (And if you’re subject to that, and you’re still running on SQL Server 2016, I’d be curious to hear in the comments how your experience went trying to purchase 2016 Extended Security Updates (ESU) from Microsoft.)

Brent has a list, and if you have any 2017 instances kicking, it’d be a good idea to get started on these.

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Stretching an Availability Group to Azure

Published 2026-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich begins a series:

Every IT person has lived this outage: the app is down, the database team says the database is fine, the network team says the network is fine, and infrastructure team says the DCs are fine. Everyone is right, and the app is still down. The problem is in the seam between us. My goal is to bridge that gap. Not only for myself, but to show others out there that from the DBA’s chair, the network, infrastructure, and the database don’t have to be such completely separate knowledge domains where one is a black box to the other.

To blame the network, you must understand the network.

Okay, that’s not true at all. But still, it’s a good idea to know this stuff.

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UNC Paths on SQL Server Agent PowerShell Jobs

Published 2026-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Dualcore DBA troubleshoots an issue:

It’s a classic backup job – run the backup using T-SQL and then upon success, purge the backup directory of backups that are older than a given number of days.

My backup job step backs up to a UNC path – \\192.168.2.174\Backups and then the PowerShell step will purge any backups older than 7 days.

Easy peasy…until it isn’t. Click through for the error and the solution.

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Architecting a Reporting Solution on a Fabric F2

Published 2026-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers builds it on the cheap:

In this blog post, I want to show you how I architected a customer reporting solution using a single Microsoft Fabric F2 capacity and Power BI Embedded through Entelexos.

The two core subscriptions total USD $362 per month. That covers the reserved Fabric capacity and the Entelexos Basic subscription.

The reason I wanted to share this is to show that it is possible to engineer a cost-effective solution for smaller customers.

Click through to see how.

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