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Author: Kevin Feasel

Checking SQL Server Availability Groups

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci announces a new procedure:

SQL Server Availability Groups can be a great feature to help support your High Availability needs, but what happens when they fail to work as expected?

Do you have an expiring certificate on used by an endpoint? Do you have timeout settings that could contribute to unexpected failovers? Are you suffering from a high number of HADR_SYNC_COMMIT waits?

We’ve seen all those things happen, and like Marvin Gaye we’ve wondered: what’s going on? And we’ve wanted a tool to help us see if other clients were having these problems, and more.

Read on for more information and check it out yourself.

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Fun with DATE_BUCKET()

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson tries out a function:

Using this function, you can group data easily into different time buckets, like year, month, day (which are standard enough, of course), but also into buckets like 2 days, 6.4 weeks, etc. Now, I don’t feel like this should ever make you decide that you don’t need a date dimension for you warehouse, but it is great when you are are just checking out data and want to play with different intervals in an easy manner.

Read on to see how it works.

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ALTER TABLE and Partitioned Tables in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chao Li classifies a series of commands:

Does an operation propagate to partitions? Does it affect future partitions? Does ONLY do what it claims? Why do some commands work on parents but not on partitions—or vice versa?

Today, PostgreSQL documentation describes individual ALTER TABLE sub-commands well, but it rarely explains their interaction with partitioned tables as a whole. As a result, users often discover the real behavior only through trial and error.

This post summarizes a systematic investigation of ALTER TABLE behavior on partitioned tables, turning scattered rules into a consistent classification model.

Click through for 15 buckets of commands relating to ALTER TABLE in PostgreSQL and see how they handle dealing with partitioned tables.

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Microsoft Fabric Copy Job Updates

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ye Xu lays out some changes:

This update introduces several enhancements to native incremental copy and change data capture (CDC) capabilities in Copy job, including support for additional data source stores for incremental copy, expanded CDC support for SAP Datasphere Outbound for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage (in addition to Microsoft Cloud Storage), and Column Mapping support for CDC in Copy job.

Click through to see what has changed in the copy job.

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Dealing with Long-Running I/O Requests in SQL Server

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis has a two-parter. First up is finding instances of long-running I/O Requests:

When diagnosing storage or latency issues, one SQL Server message factors in more than many:

“SQL Server has encountered X occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file…”

Where X might be 1, 5 or 50, and it could list a file from any one of your databases. When you see this, the next good question is when did it happen and where.

And then the question is, what do you do about it? Rebecca provides some guidance:

In a previous post, I shared a script to detect the I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds warning across your SQL Server inventory.  Now let’s talk about what to do when you find it.

Here are five of the most common causes with some tips to investigate each:

The neat part is, it’s not always due to slow storage or bad hardware.

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BIGINT Serial Columns in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Elizabeth Christensen lays out an argument:

Lots of us started with a Postgres database that incremented with an id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY. This was the Postgres standard for many years for data columns that auto incremented. The SERIAL is a shorthand for an integer data type that is automatically incremented. However as your data grows in size, SERIALs and INTs can run the risk of an integer overflow as they get closer to 2 Billion uses.

We covered a lot of this in a blog post The Integer at the End of the Universe: Integer Overflow in Postgres a few years ago. Since that was published we’ve helped a number of customers with this problem and I wanted to refresh the ideas and include some troubleshooting steps that can be helpful. I also think that BIGINT is more cost effective than folks realize.

Click through for Elizabeth’s argument. I’d say that this is very similar for SQL Server, where I’m more inclined to create a BIGINT identity column, especially because I almost automatically apply page-level compression to tables so there’s not really a downside to doing this. Identity columns don’t have a domain, so there’s no domain-specific information like you’d get with a column such as Age; and with page-level compression, you’re not wasting space.

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Lessons Learned from a Trigger

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Pat Wright tells a story:

I haven’t participated in a #TSQL Tuesday in quite some time.  I saw this topic and said, “That’s perfect!”  I love talking about Failure and mistakes!  I have a whole presentation about it, and I’m hoping to make a series of blog posts about it very soon.   

You do not learn from success in life; you learn from failure.  I hope you are making lots of mistakes so that you can learn! 

Read on for a story from Pat around creating a trigger and not realizing the consequences. This is why we don’t let just anybody have mogwais triggers.

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Running PostgreSQL on Kubernetes

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Umair Shahid digs into the arguments for and against:

“Should PostgreSQL run on Kubernetes too?”

The worst answers are the confident ones:

  • “Yes, because everything else is on Kubernetes.”
  • “No, because databases are special.”

Both are lazy. The right answer depends on what you’re optimizing for: delivery velocity, platform consistency, latency predictability, operational risk, compliance constraints, and, most importantly, who is on-call when things go sideways.

Click through for a detailed analysis. It’s a similar story in SQL Server:

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SQL Server 2025 CU1 Woes

Published 2026-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar notes some problems:

SQL Server 2025 Cumulative Update 1 came out last week, and I was kinda confused by the release notes. They described a couple dozen fixed issues, and the list seemed really short for a CU1.

However, the more I dug into it, the weirder things got. For example, there were several new DMVs added – which is normally a pretty big deal, something to be celebrated in the release notes – but they weren’t mentioned in the release notes. One of the DMVs wasn’t even documented. So I didn’t blog to tell you about CU1, dear reader, because something about it seemed fishy.

Read on for a big deal.

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Measuring Time to Display an Image in Power BI

Published 2026-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb breaks out the stopwatch:

Carrying on my series on troubleshooting Power BI performance problems with Performance Analyzer, another situation where a report may be slow even when the DAX queries it generates against the underlying semantic model are fast is when you have large images displayed in an Image visual. Let’s see an example.

Click through for that example. And maybe don’t plop in so many 25 MB images.

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