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Author: Kevin Feasel

Source Control: A Call to Action

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones wants you (to learn about source control):

I have been surprised how many people aren’t comfortable with version control or Git. Many don’t have the habit, but are amenable to it. What I’m amazed by in 2025 is how many people don’t use it, given that so many tools we use to work with databases, and even other systems, will store items in Git. This isn’t just for development code, but also for infrastructure code. Lots of data tools and servers can store data in Git and use it to deploy changes to all kinds of systems. I’d have expected more people to know Git.

If you’re apprehensive about learning Git, check out tools like SourceTree and GitHub Desktop. You can even use the source control built into Visual Studio Code if that’s your tool of choice. These UIs make it significantly easier to work with Git.

Then, if you want to get rid of about 80% of the pain of Git, use feature branching. Here are takes on the topic from Olivier Van Steenlandt and Adron Hall, and I’m sure you can find plenty of other examples. Git can be a pain in the neck, especially when dealing with merge conflicts, but the benefit is well worth it.

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Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Balaji Sankaran has a new announcement:

We are excited to announce Materialized Lake views (MLV) in Microsoft Fabric. Coming soon in preview, MLV is a new feature that allows you to build declarative data pipelines using SQL, complete with built-in data quality rules and automatic monitoring of data transformations. In essence, an MLV is a persisted, continuously updated view of your data that simplifies how you implement multi-stage Lakehouse processing, commonly referred to as medallion architecture.

Read on to see how it works and some of its capabilities.

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Power BI Accessibility Checklist

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska has a checklist for us:

Whether you’re designing for executives using tablets, keyboard-only users, or screen reader tech, accessibility is not a nice-to-have. It’s a design standard.

Here’s the accessibility checklist I use in client projects and workshops—and now it’s yours too!

Click through for some good advice on how to make your Power BI dashboards and reports easy to use.

For another take on the topic, I recommend reviewing Meagan Longoria’s checklist as well.

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SQL Server Standard Developer Edition

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Pollack is pleased:

SQL Server Developer Edition has for years provided a free data platform to test and develop applications in an environment that has all SQL Server features available at no cost to the organizations that use it. So long as these SQL Servers do not host production workloads, then this edition is ideal for database development.

Starting in SQL Server 2025, a new edition is available for installation: SQL Server Developer Standard Edition. This article dives into this edition, the problems it solves, and why it is a great addition for development teams that use SQL Server!

This is something people in the community have agitated over for years. It’s great that Developer edition has all of the features of Enterprise, but that can be a problem when you build your apps against the equivalent of Enterprise and deploy them to Standard, as there’s a risk you’re using an Enterprise-only feature but don’t know it.

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Monitoring Node Health in Oracle RAC

Published 2025-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman continues a series:

After my last blog post on Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) I was asked to talk about both health and how performance impact can affect a RAC database. Its architecture enables failover, workload distribution, and offers an option to scale performance, but only when all nodes play well together. When one node drags behind or becomes unstable, RAC has no choice but to protect the rest of the cluster- so help me, Oracle Gods. This protection can come in the form of node eviction, which can be both disruptive and at times avoidable with proactive monitoring and intervention.

Click through to learn how Oracle monitors node health, the types of issues you might run into, and how to prevent node eviction.

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A Peek at Fabric Translytical Task Flows

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev writes a review about writing back:

The May release of Power BI Desktop includes a new feature called Translytical Task Flows which aims to augment Power BI reports with rudimentary writeback capabilities, such as to make corrections to data behind a report. Previously, one way to accomplish this was to integrate the report with Power Apps as I demonstrated a while back here. My claim to fame was that Microsoft liked this demo so much that it was running for years on big monitors in the local Microsoft office!

Are translytical flows a better way to implement report writeback? I followed the steps to test this feature and here are my thoughts.

Read on for Teo’s thoughts.

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Analyzing Snowflake Costs

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Wilkie watches a moth fly out of his wallet and wonders where all of the money went:

Last time, in Dashboard Dreams and Snowflake Schemes, we talked a little about showing how much Snowflake really costs in a dashboard internal to Snowflake itself instead of having to push it to PowerBi, Tableau, Looker, or a myriad of other tools.

This time, let’s take it a step further: instead of sticking with the basic bar charts or exploding pie charts, we’ll explore how to better highlight usage trends by adding a Rolling 7-Day Average to our visualizations. This helps us more easily spot patterns and anomalies within our warehouses.

Read on for a pair of queries and a neat chart.

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Data Archival and Retention in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Daria Nikolaenko walks through a presentation:

I’ve started talking about something that happens with almost every Postgres database — the slow, steady growth of data. Whether it’s logs, events, or transactions — old rows pile up, performance suffers, and managing it all becomes tricky. My talk was focusing on  practical ways to archive, retain, and clean up data in PostgreSQL, without breaking queries or causing downtime.

Read on to learn more.

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The Basics of Oracle RAC

Published 2025-05-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman gives us a primer:

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is still one of the most robust instance high-availability and scalability solutions, designed to provide resilience, performance, and continuous service for many Oracle enterprise workloads. Whether deployed on two nodes or a complex multi-node setup, RAC ensures your database infrastructure is both fault-tolerant and responsive under increasing demand.  RAC is an essential part of the Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) recommended practices, (and in my experience) found in about 40% of small to medium Oracle environments, 98% of large enterprise environments and 100% of Exadata engineered systems. 

In this post, we’ll walk through the architectural foundation of RAC, configuration essentials, and a real-world transactional scenario that highlights the importance of its shared and synchronized architecture.

Read on to learn more.

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