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Author: Kevin Feasel

Object Ownership in Databricks

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chen Hirsh shares a tale of woe:

Have you ever made a change in your system and immediately regretted it? A few weeks ago, I did just that while working with a customer on their Databricks platform. His IT guys made some changes, moving a user to another domain. In Databrick, this is considered a new user, so I added the new user and gave him the same permissions as the old user.

And then, without thinking twice, I deleted the old user from Databricks.

Things did not go well from there. Read on to learn what happened, why, and how to avoid this problem in the future.

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Care and Feeding of System Databases in SQL Server

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Stephen Planck reminds us to look at the primary system databases in SQL Server every once in a while:

It’s easy to focus on user databases and overlook the system databases at the core of every SQL Server instance. However, the master, msdb, and model databases form the backbone of your environment. Understanding each database’s specific responsibilities, how to safely customize them, and how to protect them from data loss or corruption is important for maintaining a stable server. In this post we take a look at all three databases to better understand their purposes and proper maintenance.

Click through for some recommendations for each of master, msdb, and model. And please make sure you’re backing these up. Many backup jobs ignore system databases, and that’s not a great situation to be in when you’re trying to rebuild a SQL Server instance because of corruption in the master database.

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SSIS: Operating Completed with Problems Logged

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Slava Murygin uses Integration Services to process an Analysis Services cube:

If you process SSAS cubes via SSIS packages you might notice a weird message like “Full Processing:Warning: Server: Operation completed with XXX problems logged.“

How you can get that message (if you have that problem):

Slava notes that the simple solution doesn’t actually work, as both services decide not to store that information. But Slava does provide a solution to the problem.

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Automating V-Order Optimization in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Miles Cole writes a script:

I’ve previously blogged in detail about V-Order optimization. In this post, I want to revisit the topic and demonstrate how V-Order can be strategically enabled in a programmatic fashion.

Since V-Order provides the most benefit and consistent improvement for Direct Lake Semantic Models, why not leverage platform metadata to enable it automatically—but only for Delta tables used by these models?

This will be a short blog—let’s get straight to the concept, the source code, and then move on to more strategic use of this feature.

Click through for the process and an explanation of what’s happening in the accompanying Gist.

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Git for the Power BI Developer

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley has a tutorial:

Both Azure DevOps and GitHub are supported Git hosts for Power BI and Fabric workspace integration. I will demonstrate using GitHub rather than Azure DevOps because, it is free for personal use. Getting started with GitHub is quite easy, and anyone can have a free GitHub account. Simply navigate to http://GitHub.com and sign-up for an account. You may create a personal or organizational account, and your personal account can be associated with multiple organizations.

Click through for the process.

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Multi-Storage Array Database Snapshots in SQL Server

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino continues a series:

In this post, the fourth in our series, I want to share an example demonstrating SQL Server 2022’s T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in a scenario where a database spans multiple storage arrays. If you’re dealing with multi-array environments, you’ll appreciate how this technique freezes database write I/O to take coordinated snapshots across volumes on two FlashArrays. In this post, I’ll walk you through the process, point out some of the script’s key elements, and show you how long the write I/O pause takes.

Click through to learn how it all works when you have a database spanning multiple volumes.

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Running a Microsoft Fabric Notebook from ADO via Service Principal

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant needs a service principal to help:

In this post I want to share one way that you can authenticate as a service principal to run a Microsoft Fabric notebook from Azure DevOps.

Some of you may recall that I previously covered how to run a Microsoft Fabric notebook from Azure DevOps.

I decided to published a newer version of the aforementioned post to amplify the fact that the REST API that runs a notebook on demand now supports service principals.

Service principals are the way to go for this, so long as you’re having one Azure-based service communicate with another Azure-based service. No passwords, no API keys, nothing you need to remember or change every 90 days.

The problem is, this works beautifully for assets inside of Azure, but not so much outside of Azure. But that’s a story for a different day.

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Working with Unity Catalog

Published 2025-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Dustin Vannoy has a new video:

Unity Catalog Open Source Software (OSS) is a compelling project and there are some key benefits to working with it locally. In this video I share reason for using the open source project Unity Catalog (UC) and walk through some of the setup and testing I did to create and write to tables from Apache Spark.

Click through for the video, as well as a text summary and script examples.

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Notes on Change Tracking for Warehouse Incremental Loads

Published 2025-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria shares some hard-earned experience:

I have a few clients that incrementally load tables from a SQL Server source into their data warehouse or lakehouse by using change tracking. Lately, they encountered some issues with changes to the configuration and the data in the source database, so I decided to share some things you can check before using change tracking as part of your ETL load or when troubleshooting your data load.

Click through for three common issues you may run into while using change tracking.

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T-SQL Variables and Transactions

Published 2025-01-31 by Kevin Feasel

Simon Frazer rolls back:

If you’ve been working with T-SQL scripts for a while, you’ve likely encountered variables. These are essential for writing scripts that go beyond basic SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statements.

Variables can serve multiple purposes: they can act as parameters passed into stored procedures, hold the results of one query to use in another, or even help debug scripts during testing (you do test your scripts before running them on real data, right?).

One particularly interesting aspect of variables is how they behave in transactions, often in ways we might not expect.

Read on for the demo. This also applies to table variables, which is why they can be extremely important for diagnosing issues before performing a rollback. You can write error results to the table variable first, then access them post-rollback.

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