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Author: Kevin Feasel

Finding the Top 10 Products each Year with DAX

Published 2025-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari build a top ten list:

We have written and updated a few pieces in the past about how to find the top products, such as Filtering the top products alongside the other products in Power BI and Filtering the Top 3 products for each category in Power BI.

Generally speaking, finding the top products requires using GENERATE and TOPN. However, there is an interesting variation of this scenario that solves a specific business problem. Once we have determined the top 10 products by year, we want to filter only those that appear in the top 10 in most years. Obtaining that list of products helps identify evergreen products, that is, the products that remain in the best-seller list consistently.

Click through for the demonstration.

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An Error with Log Shipping in an Contained Availability Group

Published 2025-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Rich Benner diagnoses an issue:

We’ve recently come up across a fun little bug with log shipping in contained availability groups. A cursory Google search did not bring up any useful posts for troubleshooting, so here we are. If you’re here for the bug, feel free to scroll to the bottom of this post. For the rest of you, however, let’s add a little context to this scenario before getting to the meat of the situation.

Click through for the issue, as well as how Rich was able to resolve the problem.

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Generating an Entity Diagram in a Fabric Eventhouse

Published 2025-11-04 by Kevin Feasel

Guy Reginiano announces a new tool:

As your KQL database grows, tables gather data from several Eventstreams, functions connect different tables, update policies move and transform data, and materialized views quietly keep aggregated data up to date – all working together behind the scenes 

It’s powerful, but it can also be hard to see the full picture. 

That’s exactly why we built the Entity Diagram – to give you a simple, visual way to explore how everything in your database connects.

Click through to see how it works.

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“The Parameter is Incorrect” with Copy-DBACredential

Published 2025-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jack Corbett diagnoses a problem:

I was working with a client to do an upgrade/migration from SQL Server 2016 to SQL Server 2022, and this client assigns non-default ports to SQL Server.  As part of the process, I had to create a credential on one node and needed it on the other node, so I went to the handy Copy-DBACredential dbatools cmdlet, but it didn’t work.

Read on for the troubleshooting process and the ultimate issue.

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Reviewing Power BI Report Interactions via Semantic Link Labs

Published 2025-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria wants to know about visual interactions:

It can be tedious to check what visual interactions have been configured in a Power BI report. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this becomes even more important. If you do this manually, you have to turn on Edit Interactions and select each visual to see what interactions it is emitting to the other visuals on the page.

But there is a better way!

Click through for that better way.

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When repartition() Beats coalesce() in Spark

Published 2025-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Janani Annur Thiruvengadam stands some common advice on its head:

If you’ve worked with Apache Spark, you’ve probably heard the conventional wisdom: “Use coalesce() instead of repartition() when reducing partitions — it’s faster because it avoids a shuffle.” This advice appears in documentation, blog posts, and is repeated across Stack Overflow threads. But what if I told you this isn’t always true?

In a recent production workload, I discovered that using repartition() instead of coalesce() resulted in a 33% performance improvement (16 minutes vs. 23 minutes) when writing data to fewer partitions. This counterintuitive result reveals an important lesson about Spark’s Catalyst optimizer that every Spark developer should understand.

Read on for the details on that scenario.

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