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Author: Kevin Feasel

SQL Server 2025 and PBKDF2

Published 2026-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis notes the slowdown:

You upgraded to SQL Server 2025. Your SQL auth logins are slower. This is not a bug. Microsoft did this on purpose — which is actually good news, but if you’re not using connection pooling, it’s not going to feel very good.

Read on for more details, as well as a recommendation for connection pooling. On the whole, this is a very good thing—PBKDF2 is a mature process that we’ve had available to use in applications for 15+ years, and what’s particularly neat about it is that the level of effort scales linearly. As computer hardware becomes more powerful, add more iterations of the hashing algorithm to keep a fairly consistent per-login delay.

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An Overview of pgNow

Published 2026-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Hamza Sajawal looks at a Redgate product:

pgNow is a lightweight PostgreSQL diagnostic tool developed by Redgate that provides quick visibility into database performance without requiring agents or complex setup. It connects directly to a PostgreSQL instance and delivers real-time insights into query workloads, active sessions, index usage, configuration health, and vacuum activity, helping DBAs quickly identify performance bottlenecks. Because it runs as a simple desktop application, pgNow is particularly useful for quick troubleshooting and point-in-time diagnostics when a full monitoring platform is not available. 

The tool is currently free to use, and its development is actively maintained by Redgate, with potential future enhancements expected as the project evolves. It analyzes workload behavior using PostgreSQL system views and extensions such as pg_stat_activity and pg_stat_statements.

Click through for setup instructions and an overview of what it currently can do.

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A Sparkline-Enabled KPI Card for Power BI

Published 2026-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Elena Drakulevska shares a Power BI custom visual:

Sometimes you start experimenting with something small… and suddenly a whole little universe appears.

This happened while I was playing with the idea of a custom KPI card visual in Power BI.

I absolutely love KPI cards, but I’ve never shipped a custom SVG KPI to clients before. Once you do that, they can get a bit… stuck with it.

So I decided to explore a different path.

Following the fantastic tutorial by Phil Seamark, I built my first custom visual!

Click through for the results.

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Managing Eventhouses and Environments with MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series on the MicrosoftFabricMgmt module. First up is a dive into the Kusto world:

Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) is Microsoft Fabric’s answer to streaming data workloads. If you are ingesting telemetry, IoT data, clickstreams, or any high-velocity data that needs querying with low latency, this is the part of Fabric you want. MicrosoftFabricMgmt supports the full set of RTI resources: Eventhouses, KQL Databases, KQL Dashboards, KQL Querysets, and Eventstreams.

Rob then pivots to creating an environment from scratch:

Over the past few posts we have worked through a number of the item choices that you can use in the MicrosoftFabricMgmt module. Today I want to bring it all together into a single, practical script that provisions a complete Fabric environment from scratch.

This is the kind of script I could use when setting up a new project. It is repeatable, idempotent (safe to run multiple times), fully logged, and handles errors gracefully.

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Rolling Average Calculation via DATE_BUCKET()

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck writes some code for SQL Server 2022 or later:

In the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse, a new T-SQL function was recently added: the DATE_BUCKET function. With this function, you can group dates into pre-defined buckets. This allows you to easily calculate aggregates that use the GROUP BY clause over these buckets, greatly simplifying the T-SQL statements for analytical use cases.

Click through for a demo. Koen mentions that this is also now available in the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse. Once you know how DATE_BUCKET() works, it’s pretty powerful. But I also think that the function is a bit confusing to use.

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Migrating SQL Server Service Accounts to gMSA

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Deepthi Goguri takes advantage of Group Managed Service Accounts in Windows:

A Service Account is something that applications like the SQL Server, IIS, or scheduled tasks need to run under using Microsoft Active Directory. These are the regular domain user accounts, where the passwords needs to be manually managed and rotated. As these needs to be manually updated, downtime to the services are required if the password needs to be changed. Not only that but syncing these passwords across multiple servers can be an issue. This problem is resolved by using the Standalone Managed Service Account as Windows can manage the password automatically.

Read on to learn more about single MSAs and group MSAs, and some tips and limitations.

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Finding Power BI Measures without Column Relationships

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Zoe Douglas gives a visual cue that not all is well:

Have you ever put a measure on a visual with a column from a table and found it repeated the same value for every row and the total? This indicates there is no relationship for that measure and the column. And that simply may be the case, as in, there is no relationship to create. Let’s look at how we can account for that in a different way, by showing a placeholder value such as ###.

Read on to see how.

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Dealing with Multiple Fabric Capacities

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Lunn provides some guidance:

You know you can have more that one capacity? Most of the clients I’ve interacted with, even since the Power BI capacity days, they have just purchased one big old capacity, and assigned it to every workspace they needed. There have been a few clients that have had multi-region capacities, spun up across the globe for thing likes, billing to specific cost centres and regions and data ownership and sovereignty issues, but for those that don’t have those issue, they just get a big capacity.

Jon provides some guidance on environment-based capacity planning. Even within an environment, there may be cases for carving out explicit capacity, such as data science activities that are occasional but potentially disruptive.

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Partitioned Compute and Fabric Dataflow Performance

Published 2026-03-17 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb performs a test:

Partitioned Compute is a new feature in Fabric Dataflows that allows you to run certain operations inside a Dataflow query in parallel and therefore improve performance. While UI support is limited at the moment it can be used in any Dataflow by adding a single line of fairly simple M code and checking a box in the Options dialog. But as with a lot of performance optimisation features (and this is particularly true of Dataflows) it can sometimes result in worse performance rather than better performance – you need to know how and when to use it. And so, in order to understand when this feature should and shouldn’t be used, I decided to do some tests and share the results here.

Click through for the test, the result, and an open door for subsequent analysis.

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Personalizing the Command Line in Linux

Published 2026-03-16 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Williams messes with the command line:

This post is part 1 of quality-of-life changes I make when I first log in to a new Linux server. I primarily use bash (though I also have zsh set up on some machines):

  • .hushlogin
  • .inputrc
  • .vimrc
  • .bashrc

Click through for some examples of customization. I’m not sure if Thomas will get to this in the series, but I like using powerline for more advanced customization.

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