A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Guy Glantser takes us through an edge case:
Many SQL Server DBAs rely on automated statistics maintenance solutions such as Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts. These scripts typically update statistics only when the modification counter exceeds a threshold.
But there is a corner case that can cause statistics to remain empty forever, and many DBAs are not aware of it.
Read on to see how you can end up with no statistics at all on a table.
Leave a CommentRob Sewell continues a series on the Microsoft Fabric management Powershell module:
Most of this blog post is going to be more about PowerShell in general than this specific module. The MicrosoftFabricMgmt module has over 295 cmdlets, which can be overwhelming at first glance. But PowerShell’s built-in discovery tools make it easy to find what you need. Knowing how to use a command is always available in the shell itself. You can find out how to use a function, what parameters it takes, and see examples of its usage without ever leaving the command line.
I have been using PowerShell for over a decade, and I still rely heavily on
Get-CommandandGet-Helpto explore new modules and refresh my memory on ones I haven’t used in a while. In this post, I’ll show you how to use these tools effectively to navigate the MicrosoftFabricMgmt module.
Read on to see how you can get help. At least, on that front.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck actually gets an article’s length out of this:
There’s a new version of SQL Server released and we’re mainly an on-premises SQL Server shop. We’ve been using Integration Services (SSIS) for years now for all our ETL and data integration needs. With Microsoft’s focus on cloud (Azure and Fabric), does it make sense to upgrade our SSIS packages? Are there any new features?
Click through for the answer, though “stuff that’s gone away” or “stuff that you have to change because of drivers” make up almost 100% of this.
Leave a CommentGilbert Quevauvilliers grabs an item from backup:
In my previous blog post I had shown you how to backup your Microsoft Fabric Items: Backing Up Your Microsoft Fabric Workspace: A Notebook-Driven Approach to Disaster Recovery – FourMoo | Microsoft Fabric | Power BI
The next natural question is what happens when you want to restore one if the items that were previously backed up.
In the steps below I will show you how to do this.
Read on to see how it works and a bit of pain that you might experience.
Leave a CommentYou’ve got semi joins, and you’ve got anti-semi joins.
Everyone (loosely, very loosely, everyone) knows what those do: Find a match, or confirm there isn’t one. Lemon-squeezey.
The big question is, what do you call the style of join that requires a full enumeration on both sides? Erik tries out a series of ideas before landing on Omni-joins. I like the term.
1 CommentThomas Williams builds a container image:
Running R Markdown via Docker is a big help with deploying those analysis and reports for others to use.
While there are alternatives for deploying R Markdown — the most popular being Shiny Server — they add the hassle of matching R and package versions to the machine where the code was developed, may require IT help, and mean sharing disk, CPU, and memory with other apps on the same server. And there’s also licensing requirements & limitations for the free version of Shiny Server.
R Markdown on Docker avoids some of these issues; a single Docker container = a single app.
Click through for a simple RMarkdown file and Dockerfile.
Leave a CommentRebecca Lewis lays out the consequences of an existing bug:
If you use
SESSION_CONTEXT()in any query that can run with parallelism, you may be getting wrong results right now and not know it. This is not new. It has been a documented known issue since January 2022. It shipped unfixed in SQL Server 2019, 2022, and 2025 — and as of 2025 CU2 (February 12, 2026), it is still not resolved.This is easy to miss. It’s buried in the Known Issues section of CU release notes, and the symptoms — wrong results or dump files — do not obviously point back to SESSION_CONTEXT.
Read on to learn more about the issue, the current workaround, and how you can discern whether you are experiencing the issue today.
Leave a CommentKeys come in two basic flavors: natural and surrogate. Natural keys, as their name suggests, are values that occur naturally in the data. They have real-world or business meaning: an email address, the street address of a building, the serial number of an inventory item, etc. In contrast, a surrogate key (sometimes called a synthetic key) is a value added to each row upon creation. A surrogate exists only within the confines of the database; it has no meaning outside of it.
A natural key often contains two or more columns. For instance, the key for a table of vehicle types might include the make, model, year, and trim level, all four columns of which must be combined to create the value that uniquely identifies each row. Surrogate keys are always a single column, though the value of each key may be anything you choose – as long as each value is distinct from all others.
One thing I would very strongly note here is that surrogate keys are a physical data model concept. I’m a firm believer that you almost always should have a surrogate key, but there must be a natural key, even if you don’t put an actual constraint on it. Though I do recommend having a unique key constraint on the natural key as well as a primary key constraint on the surrogate key.
Leave a CommentHamish Watson lays out what DevOps means in the context of Microsoft Fabric:
Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps) is an integrated data and analytics platform designed for modern data-driven workloads, such as data engineering, business intelligence, and machine learning. With the introduction of Git integration in Microsoft Fabric, DevOps practices are becoming more accessible in the platform, allowing teams to implement collaborative, automated workflows that are common in DevOps environments.
Read on for some of the high-level concepts of what we do with DevOps and how they apply directly to Microsoft Fabric workspaces.
Leave a CommentDenny Cherry shares some advice:
This runs about as inconsistently as you would expect, given that it’s the same plan every time, no matter what values are being passed in. Getting this to perform better and consistanly requires some dynamic SQL changes that look similar to the following.
Denny’s scenario is a very common one: as developers, we don’t know which access paths users will take, so we try to develop generic solutions that can cover a wide variety of scenarios. In practice, users land on a certain set of access patterns, and now we have actual queries we can ensure work as well as possible. Except for the parts where we painted ourselves into a corner with the original generic design. But hey, that’s what the imagined rebuild that will never happen can solve.
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