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Author: Kevin Feasel

Creating a Microsoft Fabric Capacity

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu builds out some capacity:

To begin, we need to head over to the Azure portal. You might wonder why we are starting here. Well, Microsoft Fabric is now an Azure resource, which means all initial setups must be done in the Azure environment.

Click through for step-by-step instructions. Microsoft has also been really good about letting people create (and re-create and re-create) trial capacities, so if you’re just futzing about with the product to get an idea of what it can do, see if you can use that rather than shelling out the cash.

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Why Use XACT_ABORT?

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush answers a team member’s question:

This came up one day at my work when a developer was using it. I hadn’t used it before and thought I’d better check it out. It’s off by default in SQL server, but why would you use it?

Click through for the tl;dr version, followed by a more thorough explanation. I wouldn’t set XACT_ABORT on by default, but there have been plenty of instances in which I’ve wanted to handle a lengthier series of operations as an all-or-nothing job, and this is a great way to do it.

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Snowflake Query Tags in Power BI

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb takes some of the shine off of things:

Since the November 2024 Power BI release blog post announced that queries sent to Snowflake by Power BI include a query tag I’ve had a lot of questions from people who couldn’t see this happening or wanted to know what the query tags contained, so in this blog I thought I would outline the current status.

It turns out that the query tag isn’t as far along as the blog post indicated, and there are some pretty big limitations in the cases in which there actually is tagging.

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Feeding Language Models Bad Advice

Published 2025-04-14 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson begins an experiment:

So, I got this idea to test out a few LLM, ChatGPT and the Web and Office Copilot at the very least and see how they handle a load of bad advice. So I put out a question on X, asking:

“A request! Send me your most realistic, but worst, SQL Server management advice. I want to test (and write an article) about using AI to fact check writing.”

And if there’s anything this community is good at, it’s providing bad advice for purposes of lampooning.

We are going to need to wait a week to see Louis’s results, but you can check out some of the terrible advice a variety of X users proffered.

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Customizing Spark Settings in Microsoft Fabric Workspaces

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic doesn’t accept the default:

In this article, I’ll walk you through how to go from out-of-the-box default Spark configurations to a fine-tuned setup that suits your specific workloads and requirements, as well as getting you ready for the DP-700 exam.

Spark is an extremely powerful engine, but like any powerful tool, it runs best when you tune it. So, don’t always settle for default. Get dynamic—and get Spark working the way you need it to.

Click through for the explanation of functionality.

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What’s New in R 4.5.0

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Russ Hyde checks out the changes:

R 4.5.0 (“How About a Twenty-Six”) was released on 11th April, 2025. Here we summarise some of the interesting changes that have been introduced. In previous blog posts we have discussed the new features introduced in R 4.4.0 and earlier versions (see the links at the end of this post).

The full changelog can be found at the r-release ‘NEWS’ page and if you want to keep up to date with developments in base R, have a look at the r-devel ‘NEWS’ page.

There are some nice bits of functionality on the list, so check it out.

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Backups Aren’t Enough

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill lays out a common but very important argument:

Many IT leaders and system admins think, “We have full backups every night. We’re covered.” But when the time comes to restore, they discover:

· The backup file is corrupt.
· The storage location is inaccessible.
· The restore process takes way longer than expected.
· The recovery model wasn’t configured properly.
· The point-in-time restore doesn’t actually bring back the data they need.

At that point, it’s not a “backup strategy.” It’s a data loss incident.

The solution is to test those backups, and Kevin provides some guidance on how, as well as additional important parts of the story.

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Microsoft Fabric Extensions for VS Code

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Sunitha Muthukrishna announces a new trio of VS Code extensions:

Microsoft Fabric is changing how we handle data engineering and data science. To make things easier, Microsoft added some cool extensions for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that help you manage Fabric artifacts and build analytical applications.

By adding these Microsoft Fabric extensions to VS Code, developers can quickly create Fabric solutions and manage their data setups right from their coding environments. Here, we’ll look at these extensions and show why they’re useful.

Click through for notes on the three extensions that are available. Note that two of them are still in preview.

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Using DATETRUNC() in SQL Server

Published 2025-04-11 by Kevin Feasel

Rajendra Gupta shows off a nice feature in SQL Server 2022:

Suppose you are a data strategist or analyst for an organization. You have been tasked with getting actionable insights from customers who want to track customer patterns at different intervals, such as hourly, daily, or weekly. To do this, you need to use several date functions such as DATEADD, DATEDIFF, DATEPART, and DATEFROMPARTS to get the required date format.

In SQL Server 2022, this got a lot easier to do using the DATETRUNC function.

Solutions using DATETRUNC() are significantly easier to read and understand than the alternative of combiningDATEADD() and DATEDIFF()

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Analyzing Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse Query Performance

Published 2025-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres takes a peek at some views:

You may have already discovered the 4 special views the lakehouse has in the queryinsights schema to track query performance. I made a video about the lakehouse special tables, but since then, they evolved a lot:

  • queryinsights.exec_requests_history
  • queryinsights.exec_sessions_history
  • queryinsights.frequently_run_queries
  • queryinsights.long_running_queries

Let’s discover what these tables have to offer for us to analyze the lakehouse performance.

Click through to see what each one of these holds.

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