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Author: Kevin Feasel

What’s New with the Fabric SSIS Preview

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard frames the discussion:

The conversation around SSIS is heating up again.

Some see the signals and conclude SSIS is on the way out. Others point to the strength of the ecosystem and say it is far from done. Both perspectives miss something important.

The introduction of Fabric SSIS public preview does not settle the debate. It reframes it.

I see this as another way of saying, “We know you’re still using SSIS packages but we really don’t want to invest in that any longer, so how about you move it into Fabric until you do finally rewrite things as Fabric Data Pipelines?”

That said, Andy lays out where he sees the current landscape and how there are common issues across Microsoft’s ETL/ELT products, mostly in how people use them.

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Query Folding and Staging in Fabric Dataflows Gen2

Published 2026-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes digging:

A few years ago I wrote this post on the subject of staging in Fabric Dataflows Gen2. In it I explained what staging is, how you can enable it for a query inside a Dataflow, and discussed the pros and cons of using it. However one thing I never got round to doing until this week is looking at how you can tell if query folding is happening on staged data inside a Dataflow – which turns out to be harder to do than you might think.

Read on to learn more, and also check out the comment describing an alternative approach to part of Chris’s solution.

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More Command Line Personalization

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Williams continues to personalize the command line:

In my last post, I customised my Linux command line with 4 dotfiles. Putting the time into finding my way around the command line, and learning Linux commands, becomes more important on a Linux server because there’s no GUI.

I’ll continue tweaking in this post by modernising two classic commands I use daily, and adding two helper packages.

Read on for a few Linux packages that make life easier.

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Third-Party Support for OneLake Security

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill shares some guidance:

As outlined in our technical whitepaper, ‘The future of data security is interoperability‘, permissions that move with data is the future of data security. As modern data lakes are built on open-source technology like Delta and Iceberg, customers expect to use the analytics engines and services that best fit their needs—without copying data or redefining security. This creates a clear requirement: security must be defined once and enforced consistently everywhere data is consumed.

OneLake security now provides API support for third-party enforcement through an authorized engine model. This release extends the same principles used across Microsoft Fabric to external engines and services. OneLake security is now closer to its vision of defined once, enforced everywhere, even beyond first-party workloads.

Click through for more information.

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Protecting TDE-Enabled Databases

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Kehayias answers a question:

I have gotten a lot of email questions recently about TDE and SQL Server, specifically around the encryption hierarchy involved in protecting the encrypted data inside of a TDE enabled database in SQL Server. So, rather than continuing to write long emails that explain this fully, I figured this would be a great blog post topic for future reference as a way to reboot getting back to posting content more regularly on my blog. For an overview of TDE in SQL Server see the following topic in the Books Online (Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn).

Click through to learn more about how SQL Server works with the in-built encryption system for TDE and what you need to back up in order to ensure you can correct anything that might go wrong.

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Maps in Microsoft Fabric now GA

Published 2026-03-23 by Kevin Feasel

Johannes Kebeck makes an announcement:

When we envisioned Maps in Microsoft Fabric, our goal was to empower any data citizen to analyze data in time and space without any specialized knowledge. Introduced in preview at FabCon Europe 2025, it has since been used by customers across industries creating and sharing map-centric applications. Additional features were added at Ignite 2025, and this week at FabCon Atlanta, Maps in Microsoft Fabric is generally available – along with new capabilities that expand how geospatial data can be modeled, visualized, and operationalized at any scale.

Read on to see what’s new in maps.

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Sharing Data between Shiny Modules

Published 2026-03-22 by Kevin Feasel

Colin Fay explains an architecture:

Some people have recently been vocal about misuses of the "stratégie du petit r", a mechanism for sharing data across {shiny} modules that was detailed both in the Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps book and in an older post written in 2019 on this blog.
And yes, if you’re wondering, I did feel old when I realized this blog post is almost 7 years old now

I’m always happy to be proven wrong, to challenge the way I build software, and to become a better software engineer. But given that we weren’t contacted to discuss the ideas behind this strategy, I thought the moment was perfect to give y’all an update on the latest approaches I’ve been using to share data across {shiny} modules, along with some thoughts and comments on the "stratégie du petit r".

Click through to learn more about Shiny modules, the challenge of passing information between modules, and some high-level ideas of how to pass information between these modules without everything falling apart. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Azure SQL Managed Instances and CPU

Published 2026-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Obbish answers a question:

I’m going to open with a perhaps controversial statement: “when you buy 4 vCores on the Azure SQL Managed Instance platform, what you’re actually buying is 2 physical cores presented as 4 hyperthreaded cores to SQL Server”. That means that if you have 8 physical cores on your SQL Server machine today then your starting Managed Instance vCore equivalent count could be closer to 16 vCores instead of 8. Perhaps this is already well known to everyone else, but I couldn’t find any (accurate) writing on this topic so I gave it a shot.

Click through for a series of tests that do not look great for SQL Managed Instances. And it doesn’t even have to do with storage this time. Azure SQL Managed Instance has to be one of the most disappointing Azure products, simply on hardware grounds alone.

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Prevent Future Date Spillage in Power BI Visuals

Published 2026-03-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion lives in the now:

For Power BI developers, one very common (and frustrating) issue is when measures spill into future dates on charts especially when working with some time intelligence DAX calculations (e.g. MTD, YTD, etc.), date dimensions that extend beyond current date, and forecast-enabled tables.

In Power BI charts (e.g. line or bar charts), apart from dates with data, measures are also evaluated for every date on the axis, regardless if there is data or not. For example, if my dates table runs to 2026 December, but my data table only have data up to today, when I create a measure that leverages MTD or YTD for example, Power BI will tend to evaluate the measure for all dates that exist in my Dates table, unless I explicitly apply a logic to prevent this behaviour. This behaviour might result in flat lines on charts, misleading trends, and confusion to intended users.

In this article, I will demonstrate some examples of approaches to prevent or manage future dates spillage in Power BI.

Click through for some tips.

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