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Day: October 15, 2026

Stories of Risk and Reward

Published 2026-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones shares a few stories:

Most of the time that I have had to consider risk and reward in the past relates to the effort to fix a problem. Not necessarily the time, or data loss, because those are factors that are secondary to me to the ability to get a fix in. Time can matter, but if the organization has a tolerance for time, then I can work with that.

This also goes to whether the organization is willing or likely to try to fix things, or even if they are willing to let me fix things. If not, then I am way more careful about how to approach a design decision.

Click through for those stories.

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CI/CD for Report Development

Published 2026-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger checks in some reports:

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is the software development practice of constantly having new features and changes be saved and brought into a shared environment (integration) and then built into a state for testing and review (delivery). This is in contrast to doing all of your report development in a single PBIX file, making a large batch of changes, and then deploying them all to production.

It’s tempting to assume that these practices are only for large enterprises or professional software companies. In this article, we argue that many CI/CD and related practices form a maturity ladder you can climb, incrementally. Even basic steps can be useful. This is true even if you are the only developer in an organization. To use an analogy, you should still wear a seatbelt even if you aren’t a professional racecar driver.

Click through for Eugene’s advice. Granted, the amount of applicable advice when you’re working with Power BI Report Server is…less.

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Upgrading PostgreSQL on Debian Linux

Published 2026-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Dualcore DBA uses pg_upgradecluster:

In my previous post, we upgraded a PostgreSQL 15 cluster to version 18 using pg_upgrade. In this post, we’ll contrast that with using pg_upgradecluster.

As before, the upgrade process is:

  • Install new version of PostgreSQL
  • Upgrade the existing cluster to the new version
  • Remove the old cluster

Note that we have one less step than the pg_upgrade version, that step being creating the new cluster.

Read on for some attempts and some pain points in the process.

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Near-Zero Downtime Database Schema Changes in MySQL

Published 2026-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Vileikis makes some changes:

Every growing application eventually faces the same challenge: your database schema needs to change, but your users can’t afford the downtime. Whether you’re adding a column, creating an index, or restructuring a table with billions of rows, schema changes can lock tables, strain server resources, and disrupt live traffic if handled carelessly.

The good news is that MySQL offers several ways to make these changes while keeping your database online and responsive. This guide breaks down the main causes of schema-change downtime and walks through the tools and techniques — from built-in online DDL to third-party utilities like Percona Toolkit and gh-ost — that let you evolve your database safely without taking your application offline.

Click through for some thoughts and recommendations.

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Assessing an Organizational Team’s Fabric Maturity

Published 2026-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley shares a tip:

Back in Oct 2024, I posted this article on what we were learning after a year of real-world Fabric projects, and one line from it still holds up: “Organizations come in all shapes and sizes, with various needs and different appetites for simplicity, complexity and sophistication. I’ve always been a bit shy about asking my consulting clients how ‘mature’ their business or IT teams are, but this is honestly the most accurate term.”

Maturity isn’t about company size — it’s how nimbly you can move and how much rigor your culture actually needs and wants. Overshoot it and you get process for its own sake; undershoot it and good ideas run without guardrails. The real question is whether your culture lets you move too fast, too slow, or efficiently — and that’s the lens for the assessment below.

Read on for Paul’s thoughts.

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