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Author: Kevin Feasel

Azure Pricing and Exchange Rates

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton troubleshoots a billing issue:

So you signed up for a three year deal to keep costs down and more predictable.  But while Reservations can make Azure spend more predictable, they can’t make it completely static. You’ll be OK if you’re paying in USD, but if your organisation is billed in any other currency, you’ll be subject to the vagaries of exchange rates when buying any Azure service. 

Read on for a specific instance in which UK customers experienced a fairly significant price change based on the timing of changes in currency exchange rates.

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Adaptive Joins and Large Memory Grants

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little re-creates a problem:

Adaptive joins let the optimizer choose between a Hash Join and a Nested Loop join at runtime, which can be fantastic for performance when row count estimates are variable. Recently, when Erik Darling taught two days on TSQL at PASS Community Data Summit, a student asked why a query plan where an adaptive join used a Nested Loop at runtime ended up with a large memory grant anyway.

I didn’t remember the answer to this, but the great thing about co-teaching is that Erik did: adaptive joins always start executing as Hash Joins, which means they have to get memory grants upfront. Even if the query ultimately switches to a Nested Loop at runtime, that memory grant was already allocated. This has real implications for memory usage, especially in high-concurrency environments.

Read on for a dive into adaptive joins, how they work, and the consequences when the database engine makes use of them.

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Thoughts on the Future of MySQL

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Stokes shares some thoughts:

 I am not intentionally trying to upset anyone with this blog post or minimize the efforts of many brilliant people whom I admire. However, I connected with several people over the 2025 holidays who all had the same question: What is the future of MySQL? At the upcoming FOSDEM conference, several events will discuss this subject and push a particular solution.  And in several ways, they are all wrong.

Oracle has not been improving the community edition for a long time now. They have laid off many of their top performers in the MySQL group. We got almost a good decade and a half out of Oracle’s stewardship of the “world’s most popular database”, and we should be thankful for that. However, now that time is over, it is time to consider future options that will involve no updates, CVEs, or innovation for what is the MySQL Community Edition.

Read on for a few possibilities, focusing on the open-source database market.

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SQL Server Container Startup Scripts

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski notices a change:

Hmm, ok we have a script /opt/mssql/bin/launch_sqlservr.sh and then the sqlservr binary is called.

I swear this wasn’t always the case, have I seen that before? Started to doubt myself so spun up a pod running an older version of SQL (2019 CU5) and took a look: –

It looks like this was a somewhat recent change, but with it comes an interesting new capability that Andrew shows off.

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Collation Conflicts and tempdb

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low sorts out an issue:

I see these issues all the time. Developers create applications that require specific collations at the server level, because they don’t handle temporary tables (and by extension) tempdb well.

All this can be avoided, and you can easily build applications that will work with temporary tables, without worrying about the server (and tempdb) collation.

Read on to learn more about the problem and what you can do to mitigate it.

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Solid Black Icons in Power BI Desktop January 2026

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo clues us in on a bug:

In mid-January 2026, many Power BI Desktop users began noticing a strange visual regression: several icons in the interface—including the Data, Model, and DAX icons—appeared as solid black shapes instead of their normal outlines. The issue appeared suddenly, even on machines where Power BI Desktop had not been updated. Because it happened the same week that Power BI Desktop January 2026 was released, this led to understandable confusion.

The root cause was not Power BI Desktop itself but an unexpected regression in the WebView2 runtime, one of the external dependencies used to render parts of the UI. Microsoft confirmed the issue and is preparing an official fix.

Marco does have a temporary fix that works until Microsoft has the official fix in place.

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Removing a Supersized tempdb File

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci wants to smooth things out:

While reviewing the configuration of a client’s SQL Server instance recently, I noticed that they had a very curious tempdb configuration. Although it had multiple files for the eight CPU cores as Microsoft recommends for tempdb configuration, it also had another MUCH larger file with a MUCH larger growth rate.

And it turns out that when this happens, there are some knock-on effects that make it a challenge to remove such a file later. But read on for the solution.

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Operating on Distributions in R with distionary

Published 2026-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Vincenzo Cola announces a new R package:

After passing through rOpenSci peer review, the distionary package is now newly available on CRAN. It allows you to make probability distributions quickly – either from a few inputs or from its built-in library – and then probe them in detail.

These distributions form the building blocks that piece together advanced statistical models with the wider probaverse ecosystem, which is built to release modelers from low-level coding so production pipelines stay human-friendly. Right now, the other probaverse packages are distplyr, allowing you to morph distributions into new forms, and famish, allowing you to tune distributions to data. Developed with risk analysis use cases like climate and insurance in mind, the same tools translate smoothly to simulations, teaching, and other applied settings.

Click through for an overview of the package.

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Efficient Sampling of Spark Datasets

Published 2026-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Rajesh Vakkalagadda needs a sample:

Sampling is a fundamental process in machine learning that involves selecting a subset of data from a larger dataset. This technique is used to make training and evaluation more efficient, especially when working with massive datasets where processing every data point is impractical

However, sampling comes with its own challenges. Ensuring that samples are representative is crucial to prevent biases that could lead to poor model generalization and inaccurate evaluation results. The sample size must strike a balance between performance and resource constraints. Additionally, sampling strategies need to account for factors such as class imbalance, temporal dependencies, and other dataset-specific characteristics to maintain data integrity.

Click through for an answer in Scala. The Python implementation would be very similar,

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LOB Data and Replication in SQL Server

Published 2026-01-23 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Beaumont diagnoses an error:

Recently, one of our clients encountered an issue while running a data update in SQL Server. The operation failed immediately with a configuration error, specifically targeting Large Object (LOB) data:

Length of LOB data (169,494) to be replicated exceeds configured maximum 65,536. Use the stored procedure sp_configure to increase the configured maximum value for max text repl size option, which defaults to 65,536. A configured value of -1 indicates no limit, other than the limit imposed by the data type.

The tricky part was, that client wasn’t using replication. Read on to learn about the culprit.

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