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Author: Kevin Feasel

PostGIS Tuning via pg_stat_statements

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Ramsey wants to make spatial querying faster:

A reasonable question to ask, if you are managing a system with variable performance is: “what queries on my system are running slowly?”

Fortunately, PostgreSQL includes an extension called “pg_stat_statements” that tracks query performance over time and maintains a list of high cost queries.

This particular post is more about pg_stat_statements in general rather than specific advice for PostGIS, but it does lay out some recommendations for using pg_stat_statements in spatial-heavy environments.

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Learning Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk picks up a new skill:

If you are reading this article on my website, chances are you know me from my Power BI content, the videos, articles, tutorials, or downloads, or you came across it on LinkedIn. I want to be upfront: I am a front-end/business person. I create reports that lead to action and help businesses make smarter decisions while building a data-driven strategy.

When I started talking about Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, people were surprised. Some were curious. Others probably wondered what had happened. For me, real-time reports push you to approach design in a completely different way because users need to take action immediately. Decisions happen in the moment, and that changes everything about how you visualize and structure information, so that got me interested!

Read on to see how Valerie picked up KQL as a language, as well as some of the challenges involved. I will say, the Eventhouse is also the fastest mechanism Microsoft has to query large amounts of data in Microsoft Fabric—it beats out the lakehouse and warehouse pretty handily.

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Breaking Changes in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-10-24 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis goes over the list:

Every new SQL Server release comes with shiny features — but SQL Server 2025 brings more than just enhancements. It’s important to know that there are several breaking changes under the hood that could futz your upgrade if you’re not paying attention.

On the whole, it’s a pretty small list but there are a few things on here that could affect any given environment.

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TempDB Resource Governor in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar tries out an update to resource governor:

We’ve finally got a way to defend ourselves. We can configure Resource Governor to divide people into groups (something that seems to be trendy lately), and then cap how much TempDB space each group can consume. You don’t even have to divide them into groups, either (take note, politicians) – you can just cap how much resources everyone can use altogether.

To keep things simple for the sake of this blog post, let’s just assume we’re limiting everyone’s usage altogether. 

Click through to see how it works, as well as some of the caveats that are going to require foresight before this works the way you’ll want it to.

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Temporary Stored Procedures in SQL Server

Published 2025-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson is only here for a little while:

Pretty much every T-SQL programmer knows about temp tables very early in their journey with the language. They are generally wonderful tools that, when used properly, can be invaluable for storing data for a short amount of time. When used improperly they can be somewhat problematic, but certainly they are a tool we all use regularly.

But did you realize you can create a temporary stored procedure as well? It is not something I had ever used before, and while I remember hearing they existed a few times over the years, I had never tried them. The other day. I was creating an informal demo of some data, and once I had written the main query that listed rows that needed to be looked at, I needed a way to display the details of some rows.

I’ve worked with production code that included temporary stored procedures one time, I think. Otherwise, I’ve never used them either. But read on as Louis takes us through the utility of this concept.

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Trace Flag 1448 and Replication

Published 2025-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Garry Bargsley covers the behavior of a trace flag:

In SQL Server environments where transactional replication runs alongside Always On Availability Groups (AGs), DBAs sometimes face a frustrating scenario: replication stalls when a secondary replica or subscriber is offline for maintenance, patching, or unexpected downtime.

By default, SQL Server’s Log Reader Agent is cautious. It only marks transactions as ready for replication once they are hardened on both the primary and all replicas. This ensures consistency across the AG, but it can also cause replication to stall if an asynchronous replica or subscriber is unavailable for an extended period of time.

Click through to see how it works and what the consequences are.

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DAX: VALUES in SUMMARIZE

Published 2025-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari talk about values:

We discussed VALUES in previous articles: Choosing between DISTINCT and VALUES in DAX and Using VALUES in iterators. However, there is a third case where VALUES could be used with a table reference, which is when you use SUMMARIZE to group by columns you want to iterate. In this article, we describe this particular scenario to understand when VALUES is needed to retrieve the blank for an invalid relationship using SUMMARIZE and SUMMARIZECOLUMNS.

When you use SUMMARIZE, you may want to use VALUES over the aggregated table in case it could have an additional blank row for an invalid relationship, and you must ensure that this blank row is included. This condition is uncommon because SUMMARIZE often includes blank rows for invalid relationships that are implicitly included. For example, consider the following measure that uses SUMMARIZE over the Sales table, grouping by Customer[State] and Customer[City] to apply an adjustment to Columbus, Ohio (note that there are other cities with that name in other states):

Curated SQL tip number 17: if you want to show up here, use the best city in Ohio as a (positive) example.

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Using Log Parser to Preprocess Data

Published 2025-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Lucas Kartawidjaja gives us a blast from the past:

When dealing with data inside SQL Server, especially when it’s delimited by a clear separator character, earlier versions (before SQL Server 2016) required us to write custom parsing functions—either as T-SQL user-defined functions or CLR functions. Starting with SQL Server 2016, we can use the built-in STRING_SPLIT() function to handle most of these tasks.

However, more often than not, we need to parse data that resides outside SQL Server—for example, in log files, CSV data, or other data sources. For these cases, I often use Microsoft Log Parser, a free command-line tool available here.

Click through for a demonstration of how it works. Or a reminder, if you’ve been in the business for a long long time.

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Automating Power BI Load Testing via Fabric Notebook

Published 2025-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers grabs a query:

Load testing is essential when working with Microsoft Fabric capacity. With limited resources, deploying a Power BI report without testing can lead to performance issues, downtime, and frustrated users. In this series, I’ll show you how to automate load testing using Fabric Notebooks, making the process faster, easier, and repeatable.

Inspired by Phil Seamark’s approach, this method eliminates manual complexity and allows you to capture real user queries for accurate testing.

Read on for the first part, in which Gilbert uses the Performance Analyzer to capture query details.

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ROW_NUMBER() Filtering Performance

Published 2025-10-22 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling answers an office hours question in detail. The question comes down to why a filter on ROW_NUMBER() where the row number is equal to 1 could differ from the same query where row number is less than or equal to 1. Knowing that ROW_NUMBER() starts at 1 and can never be anything other than a natural number, you’d think that SQL Server would treat these exactly the same. But Erik shows an example where the two can differ, and the answer was a good one. I will admit that my pre-video guess was wrong but once he showed the execution plans, things clicked. And, like Erik mentions, this is why it’s so important to dig into the execution plan, because the answers are typically in there somewhere.

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