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Author: Kevin Feasel

Moving Items around in Power BI

Published 2025-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad sends this item to the back of the line:

When you have multiple items overlapping, you often need the feature to bring one forward or move it backward. In Power BI, this feature isn’t available by right-click. Instead, there is a Selection pane where you can easily set the order of elements. The selection pane also has other benefits. In this article and video, you will learn how to use the Selection pane to build the right order for your visuals.

Read on to see how it works.

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Tips for Working with Real-Time Analytics in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-08-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens shares some tips:

When discussing options, possibilities, and solutions with customers, the Real-Time stack began to emerge. We received questions on ingestion that couldn’t be simply answered using batch processing. The best part is that we can start learning new technology!

The following blog will outline the best things I learned working with real-time analytics.

Click through for those items.

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Making Leading Wildcard Searches Faster

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar flips everything around:

99.9% of you are never gonna need this.

But let’s say you need to run queries with leading (not trailing) wildcards, like this search for all the different national versions of the Encabulator, each of which has different prefixes depending on which government it’s being sold to:

This is indeed a pretty uncommon scenario. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever needed to do this once. Well, twice, but in one case I couldn’t actually use the REVERSE() function because the column was itself an awful non-deterministic function and this solution wouldn’t work.

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Choosing the Right Logging Level in SSIS

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword does a bit of logging:

When creating SQL Agent jobs to execute SSIS packages we can choose the level of logging to be captured. Different settings are more beneficial under the right circumstances so it’s important to understand the differences to make the right decision.

These settings control the internal logging done by SSIS. This is out of the box and freely available, so why not use it effectively.

The real trick is that if you swallow all of the exceptions and errors, everybody will just assume your code is working perfectly and boom, problem solved. Or you could read Andy’s post and get actual information. Whatever works for you, I suppose.

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Sundry Causes of Slow Disk Performance

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill thinks about I/O:

“SQL Server is slow.”

We’ve all heard it. But that doesn’t always mean SQL Server is the problem. And “slow” means nothing without context and ability to verify.

More often than you’d think, poor performance is rooted in the one thing most sysadmins don’t touch until it’s on fire: the disk subsystem.

There are other potential causes as well, such as choosing the wrong RAID array format (like, say, RAID 6 for your extremely busy log files) and limited bandwidth to a SAN. Note that Kevin’s listings for what constitutes acceptable disk focuses primarily on on-premises solutions, maybe biased toward direct attached storage versus a SAN. For cloud databases, spikes of 30-60 seconds are perfectly fine, of course.

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SQL Server Regular Expressions with Multiple Matches

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson has popped and therefore cannot stop:

The goal of this week’s entry is specifically to show how to see how multiple matches can be viewed using SQL Server’s RegEx, specifically to make the examples clearer (especially in the upcoming entries).

There are several functions that you can use where multiple matches are used as part of the output:

Click through for that list and several examples of relevant functions in action.

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Grouping and Binning in Power BI

Published 2025-08-07 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad pulls an older post out of the archives:

The latest update of Power BI Desktop (October 2016) has many features. Two of these features are grouping and binning. These features used to create groups of items and visualize them better in the report. Previously you could do that by Power Query or DAX calculated columns, now it is all possible simply through the graphical user interface of report editor. In this post I’ll show you how to create banding (binning) and grouping simply with these features. If you like to learn more about Power BI; read the Power BI online book from Rookie to Rock Star.

How long has Curated SQL been around? Long enough that I covered this the first time. But hey, it’s still valid information.

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Azure API Management in front of Databricks and OpenAI

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele has a follow-up:

A few months ago, I wrote a blog post about using Azure API Management with Databricks Model Serving endpoints. It struck a chord with a lot of people using Databricks on Azure specifically, because more and more people and organizations are trying their damndest to wrangle all the APIs they use and/or deploy themselves. Recently, I got an email from someone who read it and asked a really good question:

Click through for that question, as well as Drew’s answer.

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Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse July 2025 Recap

Published 2025-08-06 by Kevin Feasel

Charles Webb lays out some updates:

Welcome to What’s New in Fabric Warehouse, where we’ll spotlight our work improving quality, delivering major performance enhancements, boosting developer productivity, and our continuous investments in security. Whether you’re migrating from Synapse, optimizing your workloads, writing SQL in VS Code, or exploring new APIs, this roundup has something for every data professional. With quality and experience at the forefront, we’ve summarized and highlighted key improvements we think you’ll love, organized into three sections:

  1. What’s New
  2. Docs Updates
  3. Roadmap Updates

Read on for that update.

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