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Author: Kevin Feasel

Fuzzy Matching in Power Query and Power BI

Published 2025-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does a bit of a match:

Have you ever wanted to match two tables together but not on exact matches, but also on a threshold of similarity? if your answer to this question is yes, then this feature is built for you. Let’s explore in details how the fuzzy matching works in Power BI. To learn more about Power BI, read Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star.

As always, Reza has a video and a blog post for us, explaining how the fuzzy matching process works and some of the knobs you can control. In the comments, Reza even digs up the specific algorithm that Microsoft uses for fuzzy matching.

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Setting TEXTSIZE in SQL server

Published 2025-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Steve Jones limits results:

There is a SET command in SQL Server that changes how much data is returned from some fields. This short post shows what I learned about the SET TEXTSIZE command.

I’m pretty sure that, if I’ve ever used this command before, it was by accident. It’s kind of a neat concept in how it can limit the result size of larger blocks of text, but I think it’s too limiting to be a good solution save for some very specific circumstances.

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Filtering Weekdays using DAX

Published 2025-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari show that tracking weekdays is like an onion:

Computing time intelligence calculations in DAX is rather simple. However, as soon as the requirements are not trivial, the complexity of formulas skyrockets, and it is necessary to have a very good understanding of several details about DAX to obtain a good formula. In this article, we show a simple requirement: the need to maintain a filter on weekdays while computing time intelligence. As you are about to read, it will require several complex steps despite being a simple requirement; but let us start by clarifying what we want to obtain and what a filter-preserving column is.

Click through for the full article.

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Avoid aggregate in R on Wide Matrices

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Ali Oghabian shares some hard-earned advice:

The aggregate function can be very useful in R, allowing one to run a function (e.g. mean) within groups of rows, in each column in a matrix/data-frame and organize the results in an easy-to-read table. However, the function takes long to run for very wide matrices and data frames, where the number of the columns are large. I this post I demonstrate the issue and show a couple of nice solutions that at least for the example cuts down the time to 15% and even less, compared to the run-time of the aggregate function.

Click through for a demo. Granted, this is a matrix with 10,000 columns, so I’m not sure how this applies to narrower matrices. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Locking Down a PostgreSQL Database

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Thom Brown shares some advice:

As you may have heard, there are reportedly over 1,500 PostgreSQL servers that have been exploited to mine Bitcoin. And your server could be next if you haven’t taken precautions. Firstly, you need to update to the latest minor release, just so no known exploitable bugs exist on your system. But regardless of whether you update, your PostgreSQL instance could still be misconfigured in a way that would allow unwelcome visitors access, so you need to make sure you shore up your defenses. Here are some steps you should take.

Click through for some solid guidance.

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400 Bad Request when Debugging a Data Factory Pipeline

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck runs into a problem:

I recently had a new pipeline fail. It was actually a copy of an old pipeline where I had made some adjustments into as part of a database migration. When triggered during an execution run, it failed saying some expression could not be parsed. When I went into the pipeline and triggered a debug, it immediately failed with the following helpful error message:

Click through for the error message and how Koen was able to fix the issue.

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FabCon Announcements for DAX and Semantic Models

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo summarizes the announcements:

I usually do not write about announcements and new features until we have had time to try and test them in the real world. However, there are always exceptions, and some of the announcements at the Microsoft Fabric Conference 2025 fall into this category because I have worked with them enough to provide hands-on feedback.

In short, these are the topics I am covering in this blog post:

  • Direct Lake and Import mode
  • Calendars in DAX
  • User-Defined Functions (UDF) in DAX

These weren’t the headline-grabbers of the conference, but Marco explains the importance behind each of them.

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Dealing with Time in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Radim Marek clocks in for the day:

The next possible source of confusion when working with time in PostgreSQL is presence of two distinct data types:

  • timestamp (or timestamp without time zone)
  • timestamptz (or timestamp with time zone) Despite what the names suggest, the key difference isn’t whether they store timezone information, but rather how they handle it during storage and retrieval.

Click through for quite a bit of detail and plenty of examples on how to handle date and time data in PostgreSQL. And I’m still jealous about support for intervals, especially in window functions.

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Handling a Sort Operation in SQL Server Integration Services

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword knows that sometimes, the only winning move is not to play:

Last time out we discussed blocking transformations, what they are, the impact of them, and touched on how to deal with them. In this post we’re going a step further to tackle one of them head on.

Here we’ll demonstrate the impact of blocking caused by the Sort transformation, and look at two options for solving this and slashing execution time.

Sorts aren’t the only blocking transformation that you should push back down to your source (if possible), but it is the most common example.

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