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Day: November 4, 2026

Space-Filling Curves to Display Battles over Time

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Vale plots historical battles:

I recently learned about an interesting way of reducing the dimension of a data set. I’d like to illustrate it with a data set of about 550 historical battles in the UK, extracted from Wikidata using a SPARQL query. No doubt some readers will have seen this idea before, but it’s new to me and I found it pretty.

The following plot shows the raw data, with a crossed swords symbol for the location of each battle. It’s possible to see some patterns on the plot (for example, it probably wasn’t much fun to live on the borders of mediaeval Wales) but it could be clearer.

Click through to learn about Hilbert curves and how we can use them to map 2D information to a 1D space. I’d love to see the repro code for this, but Richard does explain the technique. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Getting Visual Basic 6.0 to Run on Windows 11

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West has a hobby:

In 1999 I released my first commercial software product. ShutOff 2000 was a Windows application that could log off or shut down Windows in multiple ways. It was successful enough that a serial number generator was produced by at least two hacker collectives. A badge of honour, really.

So now that I’m retired, I thought I’d go back and look at how different life is from the last release, which was as recent as 2014.

And then I realized I needed to install Visual Basic 6.0 on my 64-bit Windows 11 virtual machine.

This goes about as well as you’d expect, except that, by the end of it, Randolph actually has a working solution.

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DML in Postgres

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey tries out some syntax:

Once your PostgreSQL tables are built, the next step is putting them to work. This guide walks through the core data operations every PostgreSQL user needs: inserting records with INSERT, retrieving them with SELECT, filtering and combining tables with WHERE and JOIN, and modifying or removing data with UPDATE and DELETE.

You’ll also learn how PostgreSQL handles IDENTITY columns, sequences, aliases, and referential integrity.

Click through for Grant’s notes.

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AI Functions in the Fabric Warehouse

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck shows off a few functions:

We are building a data platform using Microsoft Fabric and we are using the warehouse as the main database engine to store our data. We need to process unstructured data coming from various sources, such as logs, free-text fields in user forms, reviews etc. Our team is quite proficient in T-SQL, but the native T-SQL functions we know from SQL Server are limited in their ability to handle the unstructured text. Ideally, we would parse the data using AI tools, but we don’t know how to do this from the warehouse. What are our options?

Click through for the list. Based on Koen’s example, the AI_FIX_GRAMMAR one works about as well as Word’s grammar checker, which means that it does a decent job of fixing spelling but is awful for actual grammar.

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The Pain of Azure Defender Billing

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones walks through a painful experience:

I hadn’t done much in the last couple of months on Azure. For some reason, I decided to check my bill. What I found was that there were charges for $35-ish/month. This is within my free credit limit as an MVP, but that seemed high. I have a few serverless dbs and some storage, but I was expecting more of a $15 charge.

Azure billing is probably 85% of what an ideal billing solution would look like. There’s a lot of detail and you can get the bill down to a pretty granular level. But the problem is, like Steve found out here, that it’s really hard to tie back individual line items to specific services in a consistent way. Sometimes it’s because of ancillary costs like networking bandwidth. Sometimes, it’s a problem where you can’t easily see what specific resource is costing you money. Either way, it turns a proper audit of the bill into a bit of an ordeal.

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Truncating a Terabyte-Sized Table in a SQL Server Availability Group

Published 2026-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Josh Darnell performs a test:

Years ago, I read a Q&A about the consequences (in terms of latency, log backups, etc.) of truncating a table with billions of rows in an Availability Group. I even wrote my own A to the Q with some measurements, although there was no AG involved in my test. Anyway, I was recently reminded of all that, and realized that AI might make it a lot easier to just test and see what happens.

Read on to see what Josh figured out.

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