A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Jon Vöge finishes spring cleaning in November:
With the above assessments of Task Flows and Tags in mind – How could we go about implementing these different solutions to item labeling in practice today?
The answer? It depends on your Domain, Workspace and Workspace Folder strategy.
Read on to learn more about what Task Flows and Tags are, and how you can use them for organization.
Leave a CommentGuy Reginiano announces a new tool:
As your KQL database grows, tables gather data from several Eventstreams, functions connect different tables, update policies move and transform data, and materialized views quietly keep aggregated data up to date – all working together behind the scenes
It’s powerful, but it can also be hard to see the full picture.
That’s exactly why we built the Entity Diagram – to give you a simple, visual way to explore how everything in your database connects.
Click through to see how it works.
Leave a CommentTomaz Kastrun has fun generating a triangle:
What motivates human behaviour can be captured in the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (source: Wiki). Maslow and psychologists have articulated these needs in a form of a Pyramid, and ever since the concept had been widely adopted (also criticised), and yet, another adaptation is the Pyramid of R needs
Read on for Tomaz’s take, as well as how to generate such a pyramid.
Leave a CommentVlad Drumea does a bit of digging:
Back in June I wrote a post about SQL Server 2025’s new PBKDF2 hashing algorithm, in which I’ve mentioned that “I don’t yet have way to build the new PBKDF2 password hash from parts”.
So, almost 5 months later, after some more reading and a decent amount of trial and error, I finally have it.
That is some neat detective work on Vlad’s part.
Leave a CommentJack Corbett diagnoses a problem:
I was working with a client to do an upgrade/migration from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2022, and this client assigns non-default ports to SQL Server. As part of the process, I had to create a credential on one node and needed it on the other node, so I went to the handy Copy-DBACredential dbatools cmdlet, but it didn’t work.
Read on for the troubleshooting process and the ultimate issue.
Leave a CommentAndrew Pruski tries out a new feature:
Accelerated database recovery was introduced in SQL Server 2019 and provides fast recovery, instantaneous transaction rollback, and aggressive log truncation. A complete overview of how ADR achieves this is documented here.
Now in SQL Server 2025 we can switch on ADR for tempdb!
Read on to see what benefits you can get.
Leave a CommentMeagan Longoria wants to know about visual interactions:
It can be tedious to check what visual interactions have been configured in a Power BI report. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this becomes even more important. If you do this manually, you have to turn on Edit Interactions and select each visual to see what interactions it is emitting to the other visuals on the page.
But there is a better way!
Click through for that better way.
Leave a CommentJanani Annur Thiruvengadam stands some common advice on its head:
If you’ve worked with Apache Spark, you’ve probably heard the conventional wisdom: “Use
coalesce()instead ofrepartition()when reducing partitions — it’s faster because it avoids a shuffle.” This advice appears in documentation, blog posts, and is repeated across Stack Overflow threads. But what if I told you this isn’t always true?In a recent production workload, I discovered that using
repartition()instead ofcoalesce()resulted in a 33% performance improvement (16 minutes vs. 23 minutes) when writing data to fewer partitions. This counterintuitive result reveals an important lesson about Spark’s Catalyst optimizer that every Spark developer should understand.
Read on for the details on that scenario.
Leave a CommentUmair Shahid explains what dirty pages are in PostgreSQL:
PostgreSQL stores data in fixed‑size blocks (pages), normally 8 KB. When a client updates or inserts data, PostgreSQL does not immediately write those changes to disk. Instead, it loads the affected page into shared memory (shared buffers), makes the modification there, and marks the page as dirty. A “dirty page” means the version of that page in memory is newer than the on‑disk copy.
Before returning control to the client, PostgreSQL records the change in the Write‑Ahead Log (WAL), ensuring durability even if the database crashes. However, the actual table file isn’t updated until a checkpoint or background writer flushes the dirty page to disk.
The concept is the same in SQL Server. Read on to see how PostgreSQL manages dirty pages and some of the issues you might run into with them.
Leave a CommentMike Walsh shares some advice:
If you’ve ever asked yourself, “Why does my SQL Server seem slower on Hyper-V than it should be?!”, this post might help. And if you asked me about Hyper-V ten years ago, I’d probably have laughed. Maybe even less than that. But here’s the thing: it scales, it works, and with the Broadcom/VMware “fun” squeezing the world for profit, we’re seeing more and more folks making the move to Hyper-V. You have to pay attention to some key configurations, just as with VMware..
None of this is radical advice, but it is good to make sure that you have the basics covered because these can make a difference.
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