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Author: Kevin Feasel

The Complexity of Cloud Security

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis shares a tale of woe:

Cloud-based SQL Server security isn’t simpler. It’s different — and the learning curve is brutal if you grew up on-prem.

If you’ve spent years working Windows authentication, SQL logins, role memberships, and the occasional certificate, you may assume cloud security is more of that, just with a portal. Not. The SQL Server/Cloud permission models are layered differently, the terminology shifts depending on the platform, and the people who ‘own’ security are spread across teams that don’t always speak the same language.

Read on for an example of the kinds of challenges you can run into. Adding to that complexities around managed identities and authorization mechanisms and things can get very convoluted, even when the intent is to simplify matters.

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Workspace-Level Surge Protection Controls in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Pankaj Arora announces a new preview feature:

Until now, surge protection applied only at the capacity level—meaning all workspaces shared the same rules.

What’s new: workspace-level surge protection

We’re taking surge protection to the next level with workspace-level controls. This update gives you more granular management of compute usage across your organization.

Read on to see what this means for organizations using Microsoft Fabric.

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Showing Transaction Details on Power BI Matrices

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari want more detail:

A common challenge in Power BI reporting is how to display several pieces of information about a single item (such as sales transactions, product details, or customer details) without dedicating a separate column to each attribute. Using individual columns for each detail can consume space, especially for fields that are often empty. This article explores techniques to consolidate multiple fields from a business entity or transaction into a single column in a matrix visual, thus presenting transaction details in a space-efficient way.

They walk through several iterations of the process. The real challenge with displaying those details is that your end users need to understand what’s in the details, as there’s no good way to describe what the information means. But when your users do understand what can be in there, I could see this being quite helpful.

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Buffers in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Radim Marek goes deep into buffers:

The work around RegreSQL led me to focus a lot on buffers. If you are a casual PostgreSQL user, you have probably heard about adjusting shared_buffers and followed the good old advice to set it to 1/4 of available RAM. But after we went a little bit too enthusiastic about them on a recent Postgres FM episode I’ve been asked what that’s all about.

Buffers are one of those topics that easily gets forgotten. And while they are a foundation block of PostgreSQL’s performance architecture, most of us treat them as a black box. This article is going to attempt to change that.

Read on to learn more about how PostgreSQL users buffers.

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Tracking Unused Indexes in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq wants to see which indexes are in use:

Indexes exist to speed up data access. They allow PostgreSQL to avoid full table scans, significantly reducing query execution time for read-heavy workloads.

From real production experience, we have observed that well-designed, targeted indexes can improve query performance by 5× or more, especially on large transactional tables.

However, indexes are not free.

The reasons for why are very similar to what we have in SQL Server. The way to track utilization is a bit different, however.

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IMPORT Functions in Excel

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson looks at a pair of beta functions:

Microsoft just added some brand-new IMPORT functions, designed to make bringing external data into Excel easier!

Instead of digging through menus or writing your own queries, you can now just use these new formulas, IMPORTTEXT and IMPORTCSV.

Importing data is something we do all the time, downloading CSV files, opening data from text files, or pulling data from databases. Having some new functions to keep expanding that skill set is just going to save so much time!

For well-structured files, these functions look to be quite effective. I do wonder how they’d fare against some of the messier CSVs we often need to deal with in real life.

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String Splitting to Table with Regular Expressions in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck makes use of regular expressions:

I have text stored in my SQL Server database, and I want to split it into all its different words. T-SQL has supported the STRING_SPLIT function since SQL Server 2016, but it only allows one single delimiter. There are multiple possible delimiters, such as commas, spaces, carriage returns and so on. It seems quite cumbersome to nest multiple STRING_SPLIT using APPLY. Is there a better option out there that doesn’t involve custom coding with CLR?

Read on to learn more. My understanding is that this method is similar in terms of performance to the other mechanisms we have available, like STRING_SPLIT(), tally tables, the APPLY operator, and CLR functions.

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Using Variable Libraries in Lakehouse Shortcuts

Published 2026-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Graham-Brown continues a series on variable libraries in Microsoft Fabric:

Lakehouse shortcuts are a popular addition to the Fabric set of tools to access data easily without copying it. Using a variable library in lakehouse shortcuts means its easy to point shortcuts to an alternative location. This great for ALM using development, test and production workspaces.

Read on to see how it all works.

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Azure Pricing and Exchange Rates

Published 2026-01-26 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton troubleshoots a billing issue:

So you signed up for a three year deal to keep costs down and more predictable.  But while Reservations can make Azure spend more predictable, they can’t make it completely static. You’ll be OK if you’re paying in USD, but if your organisation is billed in any other currency, you’ll be subject to the vagaries of exchange rates when buying any Azure service. 

Read on for a specific instance in which UK customers experienced a fairly significant price change based on the timing of changes in currency exchange rates.

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