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Author: Kevin Feasel

The Implications of TABLOCK in SQL Server

Published 2025-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Haripriya Naidu locks the table:

TABLOCK can greatly improve insert performance under the right conditions, but it has some implications to consider. It’s important to understand where this hint cannot be used to avoid shooting yourself in the foot, specifically due to the locking behavior of TABLOCK.

In this article, we’ll explore how TABLOCK’s locking behavior makes it less suitable for tables that cannot afford significant blocking.

Click through for a demo and some takeaways.

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Saving Money in Microsoft Fabric by Automatic Pause and Resume

Published 2025-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi saves us some cash:

If you work in data and analytics, particularly within the Microsoft Data Platform, you have likely heard of Microsoft Fabric and its many capabilities. However, one of the biggest challenges organisations face is managing costs effectively.

In previous blogs and videos, I have covered how to optimise Microsoft Fabric capacity costs by automating the pause and resume process using Logic Apps. This approach ensures that your Fabric capacity runs only when needed, reducing unnecessary expenses. But how much can this method actually save? In this post, I share the real cost-saving results after applying this automation over the past few months.

Click through for some information on how much Soheil saved over a six-month period.

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Lock Escalation in SQL Server

Published 2025-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Stephen Planck talks lock escalation:

Lock escalation is a built-in mechanism in SQL Server designed to optimize how the database engine manages locks. By reducing thousands of fine-grained locks (such as row or page locks) to a single table-level lock, SQL Server aims to lower overhead in the lock manager. In practice, lock escalation saves system resources but can also introduce challenges in high-concurrency environments. This post explores why lock escalation happens, how it works under the hood, the problems it can cause, and strategies to prevent or mitigate unwanted escalations.

Read on for the full story.

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Customer KPIs in T-SQL

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

I have a new video:

In this video, we will take a look at several useful KPIs for measuring customer growth. We will also demonstrate the utility of DATETRUNC(), calendar tables, and the LAG() and LEAD() window functions.

The calendar table (or date dimension) interlude may seem a little bit weird at first, but I firmly believe that calendar tables absolutely belong on basically every SQL Server instance, even if only in a utility database.

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An Overview of PostgreSQL Performance Monitoring via pgNow

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey announces a product:

I’ve been putting together a new PostgreSQL session called “Performance Monitoring for the Absolute Beginner.” There are several ways to get an understanding of how well your queries are running in PostgreSQL, but, frankly, all of them are a bit of a pain to someone coming from the land of Extended Events (ah, my one true love). Because of this, I saw it as an opportunity to help those just getting going in PostgreSQL. I’ll be presenting it for the first time at Postgres Conference in Orlando on March 19, 2025. Come on by.

Anyhoo, wouldn’t it be nice to maybe have a shortcut, an easier way to look at this information?

Well, there is. Redgate has been working on a completely free tool for leveraging just this sort of data called pgNow. Go here to check it out yourself, but I’ll do a quick run through here.

Click through to see how it works.

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Reading Delta Table Metadata in Power Query

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us the scoop:

There’s a new M function rolling out now that allows you to read metadata from Delta tables (at the time of writing it’s available in Dataflows Gen2 and will be available soon in Desktop). It builds on the DeltaLake.Table M function that allows you to read data from Delta tables and is similar to the Parquet.Metadata function that was released last year. 

Click through for an example of how to use it against a Delta table in OneLake.

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Finding Empty Attributes in Powershell

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick Gruenauer looks for what’s missing:

We are often looking for attributes, but what about the empty attributes? How can I find out if an attribute is empty? That is the focus of this article. I will show a practical example of how to find these empty attributes.

Let’s start with how to find attributes which are NOT empty. The following code retrieves all svchost process Attributes which have a value.

Read on for the pipeline to see which attributes have a value, followed by a similar pipeline to find missing values, as well as one practical use case for why you might use this.

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Using a Naming Convention for Microsoft Fabric Items

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld asks, what’s in a name?

In Fabric, you can have many different items in your Workspace. So many, that you easily get lost! Luckily there are tools at hand like Taskflows and Workspace folders. But still, it can be challenging to easily find all your items that ingest data, or find all items that are used for inbetween layers to transform data.

In this blog, I will tell you more about my personal best practice for naming convention of Fabric items that helps me to structure everything in my workspace.

This kind of thing typically doesn’t matter much when you only have a dozen or so items in your workspace. But as that number increases and different teams are working on different sets of items, it gets harder to figure out what’s going on without a proper naming convention.

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Migrating Azure PostgreSQL Single Server to Flex via pg_dump

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush changes server type:

This is more complicated than using the Azure Migration method, but because it’s maxed out on resources for the last week in the east regions (and possibly central), and who knows when they will fix it, I had to resort to other methods. I’m getting on flex sooner than later. I want to get this over with and get to those performance improvements and better features. I will preface this all by saying, if you have big databases, this may not be the right path for you. Look into streaming replication or wait for Microsoft to fix their migration tool and do an online migration via that. Also, if you don’t have strong Postgres skills, this is far more complicated than the migration tool in Azure, far more complicated.

Click through for the step-by-step instructions.

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