Erik Darling continues a series on transaction isolation levels. If you haven’t been watching this series, I’d recommend checking out his channel and catching up, as he’s spent a good amount of time on transaction isolation levels and what, exactly, that means in a relational database management system like SQL Server.
Comments closedAuthor: Kevin Feasel
Andreas Wolter describes a bug in SQL Server’s auditing capabilities:
Last week, I was contacted by an IT Leader from Saudi-Arabia who previously found several CVE’s in Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. He wanted my opinion on a newly discovered security issue in SQL Server Auditing.
Interestingly, his findings directly overlap with a topic I wrote about just last month: Using Data Classification to Audit Data Access.
Emad Al-Mousa identified two vulnerabilities in the SENSITIVE_BATCH_COMPLETED Audit Action Group. Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) acknowledged the issue but classified it as low priority – meaning it may not be addressed until a major release, if at all.
Read on to see what the issue is and how you can trigger it today. Andreas also includes a workaround that will work in the meantime.
Comments closedDavid Seis digs into scripted SQL Server installation:
In this and the next two blog posts I will be bringing diverse dbatools commands into scripts that can handle a complete deployment, do a checkup of major health and configuration metrics, and do a true up of a pre-existing instance. This post will cover the complete deployment, which if you have been reading the audit series will be much more than just the SQL install of last post. This time we are aiming for the whole thing. Install, update, configure host, configure SQL, Deploy maintenance. Everything I can think of!!
Clicking next-next-next one or two times for SQL Server installation is fine—it gives you an idea of what capabilities are available and what you need to know about. By the time you’ve installed SQL Server 5-10 times, you should familiarize yourself with the configuration files (especially because they get auto-generated for you after you use the GUI—SQL Server itself uses these to install!), and should be looking for ways to automate this process and avoid misclicks or wasting time that you could otherwise be using by reading Curated SQL.
Comments closedNicky van Vroenhoven has good news for us:
Another quick post, because today is an important day for everyone working with Fabric and Power BI!
Last month, Microsoft announced they are Sunsetting Default Semantic Models: Yaay!
Today marks that day: No more automatic child semantic models!
The idea of having a default semantic model seemed like a good one, but the problem was that too many environments had very specific needs that a default semantic model couldn’t anticipate or address. As a result, these tended to confuse end users more than save them time.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck performs an installation:
I already had a virtual machine in Azure, running SQL Server 2025 CTP 2.0 (which uses a pre-made image). I explain how to set that one up in the article Install SQL Server 2025 Demo Environment in Azure. But I wanted to use the latest preview, which is Release Candidate 0 at the time of writing. Unfortunately, there’s no image available (yet?), so I had to do it the old-school way: installing SQL Server manually.
Read on to see how to do it, as well as a few extra things necessary to make everything work well in Azure.
Comments closedDeepak Mahto performs a search:
Case-insensitive search is one of the most common issues I encounter when helping customers migrate from Oracle or SQL Server to PostgreSQL. Unlike Oracle (with
NLS_SORT) or SQL Server (with case-insensitive collations), PostgreSQL does not natively support case-insensitive search.
Read on for a few workarounds, including one that Deepak recommends never using.
Comments closedIvan Palomares Carrascosa shows off one technique for optimizing neural networks:
Deep neural networks have drastically evolved over the years, overcoming common challenges that arise when training these complex models. This evolution has enabled them to solve increasingly difficult problems effectively.
One of the mechanisms that has proven especially influential in the advancement of neural network-based models is batch normalization. This article provides a gentle introduction to this strategy, which has become a standard in many modern architectures, helping to improve model performance by stabilizing training, speeding up convergence, and more.
Read on for a quick description of how it works and a demonstration in Keras.
Comments closedChris Webb smashes into a wall:
Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows you to build semantic models on very large volumes of data, but because it is still an in-memory database engine there are limits on how much data it can work with. As a result it has rules – called guardrails – that it uses to check whether you are trying to build a semantic model that is too large. But what happens when you hit those guardrails? This week one of my colleagues, Gaurav Agarwal, showed me the results of some tests that he did which I thought I would share here.
Click through to see what happens when you go past one of those guardrails.
Comments closedBoniface Muchendu gets past the X:
Have you ever tried to create a map in Power BI only to see an error instead of your visualization? If your Power BI maps are not working, you’re not alone. By default, some map and filled map visuals may be disabled due to security settings. The good news? With a few quick adjustments, you can enable maps in Power BI Desktop or, if needed, in your organization’s tenant settings.
Read on to see why this visual might be disabled and how to enable it.
Comments closed