Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Kevin Feasel

Using REGEXP_LIKE in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover dives in:

Microsoft added several new features in SQL Server 2025, including an exciting suite of regular expression (regex) functions. After years of anticipation, there’s no longer a need to rely on CLR to use regex capabilities. As an experienced SQL developer, I enjoy finding specific rows, and the function that stands out to me is REGEXP_LIKE. I was drawn to it by its name, mainly because I frequently use the LIKE predicate. Right now, we are deciding whether to use it.

Read on for the results of Jared’s testing.

Leave a Comment

Two Ways of Using Source Control

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Seemann notes that there are two very different approaches to source control:

Git is such a versatile tool that when discussing it, interlocutors may often talk past each other. One person’s use is so different from the way the next person uses it that every discussion is fraught with risk of misunderstandings. This happens to me a lot, because I use Git in two radically different ways, depending on context.

Should you rebase? Merge? Squash? Cherry-pick?

Often, being more explicit about a context can help address confusion.

I know of at least two ways of using Git that differ so much from each other that I think we may term them two different regimes. The rules I follow in one regime don’t all apply in the other, and vice versa.

Click through for depictions of both methods and how they differ.

Leave a Comment

Accessing a Variable Library from a Microsoft Fabric Notebook

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Graham-Brown continues a series on variable libraries in Microsoft Fabric:

This post walks through how to access a variable library in a notebook in Microsoft Fabric. I recommend a Microsoft Fabric project starts by creating a variable library to store the common values different artifacts need and could be changed if a deployment pipeline gets involved. So when we create a notebook we need to be able to use these variables. This means we need load the variable library in a notebook and then get the variable values.

Read on for two ways to retrieve information on variables, as well as some recommendations around naming.

Leave a Comment

Performance Analysis of Geocoding in Power BI

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb grabs the map and pushpins:

When a user complains about their Power BI report being slow it’s normal for the developer to open up DAX Studio and start tuning the measures in the semantic model because 95% of the time the problem is the DAX. But there’s a whole class of report performance problems that are nothing to do with the semantic model or DAX and they are the ones that are much easier to troubleshoot now that Performance Analyzer is available in the browser as well as Desktop. Today I want to look at one of them: geocoding in map visuals.

Click through for a demonstration and a few tips to help limit the pain of geocoding large amounts of data.

Leave a Comment

Resource Governor tempdb Limits and Query Spills

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little performs a test:

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new Resource Governor capability to manage tempdb usage, along with making Resource Governor available in Standard Edition.

I wondered: can Resource Governor’s new tempdb feature help contain queries that don’t use temporary tables, but which spill massive amounts of data to tempdb? The docs say yes, but I always like to get hands-on experience when I can.

I’ve got an awful query that spills like a soft-serve machine choosing violence. Let’s test drive the new tempdb governance features in SQL Server 2025.

Read on to see whether this actually works and how it behaves.

Leave a Comment

Learning Fabric REST APIs via FUAM

Published 2026-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Kristina Mishra digs into the Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring tool:

Recently a colleague of mine was inquiring about creating a service principal to use with a Microsoft Fabric Rest APIs proof of concept project we were wanting him to develop for some governance and automation. Since he was still in the research phase, I told him we already had one he could use and did a brief demo on how we use it with FUAM (Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring tool). It occurred to me that others may find this a useful way to learn how to use Fabric or PBI Rest APIs. If you are also fairly new to using pipelines and notebooks in Fabric, then you can get the added bonus of learning through an already created, well-designed and active live Fabric project in your own enviroment. If you do not have FUAM installed in a Fabric capacity, or do not have permissions to see the items in the FUAM workspace, or have no intention/ability do change either of those blockers, then you can stop reading here. Unless you are just generally curious – then feel free to read-on. Or not. You do what works for you.

I personally recommend reading on. It’s kind of a thing I do here.

Leave a Comment

A Primer on Data Analysis with Python and SQL Server

Published 2026-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Eduardo Pivaral shows off a few examples of analysis techniques:

With the rise of cloud, automation and managed services, the role of the Database Administrator has pivoted towards Data Engineering.  The focus is to maintain, secure, and cleanse data in order for data analysis and decision making by the business.

How can we start using modern data analysis tools with our current SQL Server infrastructure? Further, how can we start providing end users and decision makers with important insights about our data, without spending extra money on enterprise data analysis tools?

Click through for demonstrations of k-means clustering for discerning categorical groups of data, simple demand forecasting, and generating customer segments.

Leave a Comment

Checking if a Microsoft Fabric Data Pipeline is Running

Published 2026-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Lunn checks the status of a data pipeline:

How do you check if a pipeline is running, not from the monitor, but from your Data Pipelines?

Maybe you’re like me and you have a  Data Pipeline process that needs to check if some other pipeline else is running. In my case I have to check if a process is running due to Delta tables liking you to have one process writing to them, otherwise you can get concurrency issues as two items are trying to update the same delta table metadata file.

Those tricky metadata items like the process to be exclusive. It’s not just a Delta table issue; this can happen with regular SQL databases tables. So you can use this for anything you want to stop a locking issue or have an exclusive access to an object or just don’t want a process to run while another is doing its thing. 

Read on to see how you can check the current status of a data pipeline from within a different data pipeline.

Leave a Comment

A Primer on Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

Published 2026-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low fills us in:

Let’s start with a simple idea. Real time intelligence (or RTI) is about shrinking the delay between when data is created and when you can act on it. In traditional systems, we’re often used to data being collected, stored, and only analyzed later, maybe overnight or even weekly. That’s fine for long term reporting, but it’s too slow for situations where immediate action matters.

Assume that I levy my standard complaint here about how “internet speed” is not real-time. But leaving that aside, Greg gives a few use cases for RTI, and I do think it’s a good part of the Microsoft Fabric platform.

Leave a Comment

A Data Model for Git

Published 2026-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Julia Evans updates the Git documentation:

After a while working on the documentation, we noticed that Git uses the terms “object”, “reference”, or “index” in its documentation a lot, but that it didn’t have a great explanation of what those terms mean or how they relate to other core concepts like “commit” and “branch”. So we wrote a new “data model” document!

You can read the data model here for now. I assume at some point (after the next release?) it’ll also be on the Git website.

Click through for the documentation as well as some more thoughts on Git documentation in general and contributing to Git.

Leave a Comment