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Author: Kevin Feasel

Making a Power BI Matrix Visual Look Nicer

Published 2026-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk pretties up a visual:

Many Power BI developers view tables and matrix visuals as the enemy. They dislike building them, and often think, “the user is just going to export this to Excel anyway.”
But here’s the thing: tables and matrix visuals have an important business case, and sometimes a well-structured table communicates data far better than any chart would.

There’s also something we don’t talk about enough: trust. BI developers often assume users trust our data, but that’s rarely true. Many users have been burned before by incorrect data or unreliable tools. Providing a matrix visual for row-by-row verification is a powerful way to rebuild trust.

That said, a matrix visual that looks like default Power BI formatting isn’t doing you any favors. 

And they’re probably going to export it to Excel anyhow. Them’s the breaks.

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Managed Identities in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low offers another security option for service management:

Those who have worked with SQL Server will understand the need to avoid storing passwords for accessing resources. Windows-based identities are fine for on-premises SQL Server systems, including those on cloud-based virtual machines (VMs), but are of no use when you need to access cloud-based resources like those in Azure.

Some Azure-based resources (including storage accounts) offer other access methods, such as shared access signatures (SAS), but these aren’t much of a step-up from passwords.

What’s really needed is for SQL Server to have its own Microsoft Entra based identity. These can be used directly with Azure-based resources – and that’s exactly where managed identities come in.

Click through to see how it works. Importantly, this is a feature that requires additional payment.

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Shredding JSON into Rows and Columns via T-SQL

Published 2026-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover shreds a bit of JSON:

Most databases I see nowadays have at least one column that stores JSON objects as NVARCHAR(MAX). If you look hard enough, I bet you have one. How do you convert JSON objects with arrays into a structured format of columns and rows? Not long ago, a developer asked me that exact question. It’s an important question given how rampant JSON is as a data exchange format, especially for web APIs.

This is a primer on SQL Server’s JSON functionality, at least when it comes to turning JSON into standard tabular data. I think, on the whole, SQL Server does a pretty good job of that, at least as long as your JSON data ultimately fits a tabular format.

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Sharing Git Hooks with Team Members

Published 2026-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Justin Bird shares a file:

Git hooks are scripts that Git executes before or after specific events, such as committing code or pushing to a repository. They can be used to automate tasks, enforce coding standards, or prevent specific actions. However, by default, Git hooks are stored in the .git/hooks directory of each developer’s local repository and are therefore not shared. This means that if you want to use the same hooks across your team, you need to instruct each developer to set up hooks manually, which can lead to inconsistencies and drift. In this post, we will explore a method to include Git hooks in a repository so that they can be easily shared with your team.

Click through to see how, and for a simple example.

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Vector Chunking and SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Greg Low breaks down a document:

If you’ve started to work with vector databases and looked at using text embeddings for AI search, you might have come across the term chunking and wondered what it relates to. In this article, I’ll explain the concept in general – and then show how it works in SQL Server 2025.

Read on for that explanation. Greg also includes a quick example of how this looks in SQL Server 2025 when passing text data through an embedding model.

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Filtering DAX Measures through Slicers

Published 2026-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari provide a deeper answer:

A very common request by Power BI newbies is, “How can I use a slicer to filter a measure rather than a regular model column?” The most common answer to this question is, “You cannot filter a measure through a slicer”. The answer is entirely correct because there is no such thing as “filtering a measure”. However, elaborating on the why gives us a good way to explain not only what is wrong with the question, but also how to further reason about the requirements needed to obtain a working solution.

This blog post is an example of how challenging it can be to answer a beginner’s question, where the immediate answer is “No, you can’t do that” but the underlying problem is solvable.

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Avoid JOIN USING in SQL Scripts

Published 2026-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder covers an esoteric bit of syntax:

Some SQL operators are as esoteric as they’re powerful. One of the oldest operator that you’ve likely hardly ever used in real world applications is NATURAL JOIN which is the default in relational algebra. We’ve covered a funky use-case for NATURAL JOIN earlier on this blog.

Click through for a similar example using JOIN USING. It’s best to be specific in your SQL queries, at least the permanent ones that you add to scripts you expect to re-run in the future or make part of applications.

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Risks of Using PostgreSQL as a Job Queue

Published 2026-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Yen explains why it’s not the best tool for the job:

At small scale, using Postgres as a job queue is totally fine, and I’d even say it’s the right call. Fewer moving parts, one less system to manage, ACID guarantees on your jobs. What’s not to love?

The problem is that “small scale” has a ceiling, and the ceiling is lower than most people expect. When you’ve got thousands of concurrent workers hammering a jobs table with SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, things start to behave in ways that aren’t obvious from the application layer. CPU usage creeps up. Also vacuum sometimes can’t keep up. Finally, in the wait event stats, you start seeing ominous entries like LWLock:MultiXactSLRU stacking up across many backends.

This pattern has tripped up teams more than a few times, and it usually plays out the same way: everything works fine in dev and staging, then goes off a cliff in production once the concurrency gets real. So let’s dig into why this happens, and what the alternatives look like.

Click through for more information. It’s the same on the SQL Server side of the house: once you hit a concurrency threshold, performance drops off of a cliff.

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Moving System Databases in SQL Server

Published 2026-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Rich Benner hires some movers:

As consultants, we often see system databases existing on the C drive on SQL Servers. There are some issues with this setup, and the biggest is: if one of your system databases grows and fills your C drive, you will likely crash the OS. If that happens, we’re in big trouble. Therefore, moving system databases becomes a necessary operation at times.

This is such a common issue because the default locations are set to C for these databases and that’s where they end up on fresh installs 99% of the time. Don’t worry! If you’re in this situation you’re not alone.

Click through for a query that shows which databases are on which drive and how to migrate databases post-install.

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A Primer on Group Managed Service Accounts

Published 2026-05-04 by Kevin Feasel

Randy Knight shows off a useful feature in Windows:

Service account management is one of the quietest ways a SQL Server estate goes wrong. Passwords get set once during install, written down somewhere (or worse, not written down), and then never rotated. The DBA who built the environment leaves. A security audit shows up. Suddenly you’re staring at a hundred service account passwords nobody remembers, and the prospect of changing them all on a maintenance window nobody wants to schedule. Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSAs) solve this.

They’ve been a fully supported option for SQL Server since 2014, they work with Failover Cluster Instances and Availability Groups, and Active Directory rotates the passwords for you on a schedule you control. We use them by default on every new SQL Server build at SSG.

And yet, in a decade of Health Checks, we still rarely see them deployed. The most common reasons we hear: “I tried it once and SPNs broke,” or, “I wasn’t sure it would work with our AG.” Both are addressable. Here’s what you need to know to deploy gMSAs successfully.

gMSAs are very useful at providing a managed identity for on-premises solutions. You don’t need to save passwords anywhere but still have full control over who’s allowed to access a given resource.

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