A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Thomas Williams continues to personalize the command line:
In my last post, I customised my Linux command line with 4 dotfiles. Putting the time into finding my way around the command line, and learning Linux commands, becomes more important on a Linux server because there’s no GUI.
I’ll continue tweaking in this post by modernising two classic commands I use daily, and adding two helper packages.
Read on for a few Linux packages that make life easier.
Leave a CommentAaron Merrill shares some guidance:
As outlined in our technical whitepaper, ‘The future of data security is interoperability‘, permissions that move with data is the future of data security. As modern data lakes are built on open-source technology like Delta and Iceberg, customers expect to use the analytics engines and services that best fit their needs—without copying data or redefining security. This creates a clear requirement: security must be defined once and enforced consistently everywhere data is consumed.
OneLake security now provides API support for third-party enforcement through an authorized engine model. This release extends the same principles used across Microsoft Fabric to external engines and services. OneLake security is now closer to its vision of defined once, enforced everywhere, even beyond first-party workloads.
Click through for more information.
Leave a CommentWhile on site this week, another common problem that I see everywhere arose again.
When you need to format currency, you use the “c” format right? It’s in nearly every set of course materials I’ve ever seen. And people do it in almost every demonstration.
But so often, that’s wrong!
Read on to learn why and what you can do instead.
Leave a CommentJohannes Kebeck makes an announcement:
When we envisioned Maps in Microsoft Fabric, our goal was to empower any data citizen to analyze data in time and space without any specialized knowledge. Introduced in preview at FabCon Europe 2025, it has since been used by customers across industries creating and sharing map-centric applications. Additional features were added at Ignite 2025, and this week at FabCon Atlanta, Maps in Microsoft Fabric is generally available – along with new capabilities that expand how geospatial data can be modeled, visualized, and operationalized at any scale.
Read on to see what’s new in maps.
Leave a CommentJonathan Kehayias answers a question:
I have gotten a lot of email questions recently about TDE and SQL Server, specifically around the encryption hierarchy involved in protecting the encrypted data inside of a TDE enabled database in SQL Server. So, rather than continuing to write long emails that explain this fully, I figured this would be a great blog post topic for future reference as a way to reboot getting back to posting content more regularly on my blog. For an overview of TDE in SQL Server see the following topic in the Books Online (Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn).
Click through to learn more about how SQL Server works with the in-built encryption system for TDE and what you need to back up in order to ensure you can correct anything that might go wrong.
Leave a CommentColin Fay explains an architecture:
Some people have recently been vocal about misuses of the
"stratégie du petit r", a mechanism for sharing data across{shiny}modules that was detailed both in the Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps book and in an older post written in 2019 on this blog.
And yes, if you’re wondering, I did feel old when I realized this blog post is almost 7 years old nowI’m always happy to be proven wrong, to challenge the way I build software, and to become a better software engineer. But given that we weren’t contacted to discuss the ideas behind this strategy, I thought the moment was perfect to give y’all an update on the latest approaches I’ve been using to share data across
{shiny}modules, along with some thoughts and comments on the"stratégie du petit r".
Click through to learn more about Shiny modules, the challenge of passing information between modules, and some high-level ideas of how to pass information between these modules without everything falling apart. H/T R-Bloggers.
Leave a CommentJoe Obbish answers a question:
I’m going to open with a perhaps controversial statement: “when you buy 4 vCores on the Azure SQL Managed Instance platform, what you’re actually buying is 2 physical cores presented as 4 hyperthreaded cores to SQL Server”. That means that if you have 8 physical cores on your SQL Server machine today then your starting Managed Instance vCore equivalent count could be closer to 16 vCores instead of 8. Perhaps this is already well known to everyone else, but I couldn’t find any (accurate) writing on this topic so I gave it a shot.
Click through for a series of tests that do not look great for SQL Managed Instances. And it doesn’t even have to do with storage this time. Azure SQL Managed Instance has to be one of the most disappointing Azure products, simply on hardware grounds alone.
Leave a CommentIdris Motiwala makes some announcements:
The new Migration Assistant for SQL databases simplify moving SQL Server and Azure SQL workloads into Fabric. Designed for SQL developers, it imports schema via DACPACs, identifies compatibility issues, and provides clear, actionable guidance before migration. Built-in assessment and data copy workflows help teams move from evaluation to cutover with less manual effort, preserving existing SQL skills while accelerating time to value on Fabric’s unified analytics platform. Ready to simplify your SQL migration journey? We will begin rolling this out in the coming weeks, and it will soon be accessible through the Fabric portal.
Click through for more things that are currently in place, including several items that are now GA.
Leave a CommentKenneth Omorodion lives in the now:
For Power BI developers, one very common (and frustrating) issue is when measures spill into future dates on charts especially when working with some time intelligence DAX calculations (e.g. MTD, YTD, etc.), date dimensions that extend beyond current date, and forecast-enabled tables.
In Power BI charts (e.g. line or bar charts), apart from dates with data, measures are also evaluated for every date on the axis, regardless if there is data or not. For example, if my dates table runs to 2026 December, but my data table only have data up to today, when I create a measure that leverages MTD or YTD for example, Power BI will tend to evaluate the measure for all dates that exist in my Dates table, unless I explicitly apply a logic to prevent this behaviour. This behaviour might result in flat lines on charts, misleading trends, and confusion to intended users.
In this article, I will demonstrate some examples of approaches to prevent or manage future dates spillage in Power BI.
Click through for some tips.
Leave a CommentJosh Caplan provides an update:
With shortcuts and mirroring in OneLake, you get zero-copy, zero-ETL capabilities to connect your multi-cloud data estate. Whether your data sits in Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or Oracle, on-premises, or across platforms like SAP, Dataverse, Snowflake, and Azure Databricks, you can connect it to OneLake without data movement or duplication. No more sprawling ETL pipelines. No more out-of-date copies. No more data silos.
Today, we’re expanding mirroring to now include SharePoint lists (Preview) and adding mirroring via shortcuts for Azure Monitor and Dremio (Preview). We are also releasing mirroring for Oracle and SAP Datasphere into general availability. Beyond these core mirroring capabilities, we are now introducing extended capabilities in mirroring designed to help you operationalize mirrored sources at scale. These capabilities include Change Data Feed (CDF) and the ability to create views on top of mirrored data, starting with Snowflake and will be offered as a paid option.
Click through for more of what came out of FabCon.
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