Press "Enter" to skip to content

Author: Kevin Feasel

Optimizing Power BI Data Agents

Published 2026-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley shares some advice:

Amid the AI frenzy, there is a lot of conversation about how business users will use agentic chat to answer business questions rather than interactive, dashboard-style reports. Is there truly a shift in the industry, and is agentic analytics going to change the way most business users consume data?

Just how viable is the whole “chat with your data” option, and is it really a replacement for conventional reporting? I recently heard a VP-level leader at a large consulting firm say something to the effect of “we need to stop investing in dashboard-building skills and focus on creating AI-driven data analysis solutions for our consulting customers.” I’m paraphrasing from memory, but that was the sentiment. Are all business leaders across the industry giving up their dashboards, interactive visual reports and scorecards in exchange for AI chat? No. Of course they aren’t — but conversational analysis is a new way to consume business data.

Much of the advice is very similar to what you’d get for standard dashboard creation, and it makes sense. The clearer your data model is and the tighter your semantic model is, the easier it is for processes to use that semantic model. But Paul also covers some things specific to Data Agents as well.

Leave a Comment

XML Support in MySQL and Postgres

Published 2026-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Aisha Bukar lays out how XML works in a pair of relational platforms:

XML (Extensible Markup Language) may no longer dominate modern web APIs the way it once did, but it still plays a critical role in many enterprise systems. Financial institutions, publishing platforms, healthcare systems, government agencies, and large legacy applications continue to rely heavily on XML for structured data exchange and long-term interoperability.

XML also remains deeply embedded in technologies such as SOAP-based APIs, enterprise messaging systems, configuration files, and document-centric workflows where strict structure and validation are essential. This is largely because, unlike lightweight formats such as JSON, XML was designed to handle complex hierarchical documents, namespaces, schemas, and mixed content.

Read on to see how the two open-source relational database platforms handle XML data.

Leave a Comment

Snapshot Testing in R

Published 2026-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jakub Sobolewski drills into a particular form of testing:

Snapshot testing is not about screenshots.

Most people meet it through UI regression tests: render a component, save a picture, fail the build when the picture changes. So the technique gets filed away as “the thing that compares images.” That is one use. But not the only one.

The mechanic underneath is general. Capture some output, save it to a file, and on every later run compare fresh output against the saved copy. The output can be a plot. It can also be console text, a log, a data frame, an error message, or a deeply nested list. Anything you can serialize, you can snapshot.

Read on to see how you can perform snapshot testing, using examples in R to demonstrate. H/T R-Bloggers.

Comments closed

Trusting Outputs from Fabric Data Agents

Published 2026-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard says don’t trust, do verify:

In two previous posts I went down the path of getting a semantic model ready for AI: descriptions on every measure, an instructions file, the schema tidied up enough that a Fabric data agent has something real to read. That work has a satisfying endpoint. The model looks ready.

Ready is not the same as right.

The kind of evaluation Jens is talking about is fundamental to good business intelligence practices, regardless of whether you throw language models into the mix. Where language models do add complexity is the arbitrary scope of questions, how ambiguous people tend to be when writing, and the stochastic nature of answers. All of that makes the problem harder, though at least it isn’t an entirely different class of problem to solve.

Comments closed

What’s Common in Regular Expressions

Published 2026-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

John Cook muses on regular expression libraries:

The most frustrating aspect of regular expressions is that implementations vary. Features supported in one tool may not be supported at all in another tool, or they may be supported with slightly different syntax.

I learned regular expressions in the context Perl, a maximalist regex environment. This led to frustration when features I expect to work are missing [1]. One way around this is to use Perl analogs of other tools, but this is very non-standard. I want to be able to send colleagues and clients code that works out of the box.

Click through for some thoughts about the lowest common denominator for what products tend to support around regex. This is one of several tricky things when working with regular expressions: you may know a great way to solve a specific class of problem, but does the particular engine you’re using actually support that method?

Comments closed

SQL Formatting in SSMS 22.7

Published 2026-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chad Callihan tries out a new feature:

Code formatting can be a touchy subject. Sometimes there are clear rules to designate right and wrong, and sometimes there’s not. Tabs versus spaces, anyone?

Surprisingly, SQL Server Management Studio has never had a built-in SQL formatter. Users were always left to use third-party tools or format by hand. But with the latest SSMS 22.7, SQL formatting finally comes built-in.

Let’s look at some examples and see how it performs.

Chad also spotted a problem in the formatter as it is in that release.

Comments closed

An Introduction to Memory Grants in SQL Server

Published 2026-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a new video for us:

Erik monitoring tool mogul darling here with Darling Data. In today’s video, much like I think I foreshadowed in yesterday’s office hours video, we are going to talk about memory grants. We’re going to do a somewhat gentle introduction to them and then in the next video we’ll talk a little bit more about where they get interesting. 

Erik shares his perfectly reasonable take on the nature of strings. I’d probably also get rid of dates as well—too much confusion there for my taste.

Comments closed

No More RC4 for Kerberos

Published 2026-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Lynn provides a heads-up:

In July 2026 Microsoft is making a change that may impact your environment. The change being implemented will make your environment more secure by no longer accepting the RC4 algorithm for the Kerberos protocol by default. The problem though is it could cause authentication failures, services to not start, and Kerberos to stop working. Microsoft has been working to implement this change since January 2026, and July 2026 is the final phase.

Click through to see what this means and what you can do to make sure it doesn’t affect you.

Comments closed

VS Code Extension for Availability Group Read-Only Routing

Published 2026-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry announces an extension:


Microsoft introduced Read-Only Routing to Always On Availability Groups many versions of SQL Server ago. However, Microsoft never added any sort of UI to SQL Server Management Studio. Years ago, DCAC released a Windows application to manage your Read-Only Routing configuration. We’ve converted our Windows application into a VS Code extension called SQL Always On Read-Only Routing Configuration, which you can download from the website or via VS Code.

Click through to learn a bit more about the extension. You can also view it in the VS Code Marketplace.

Comments closed

Introducing pg_hardstorage

Published 2026-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Hans-Jürgen Schönig announces a new open-source project:

PostgreSQL was once primarily deployed on dedicated servers and virtual machines, and now runs across managed database services, Kubernetes platforms, cloud environments, hybrid infrastructures, and everything in between. Many organizations operate several of these models simultaneously, often while supporting growing data volumes and increasingly demanding recovery requirements. As PostgreSQL deployments have evolved, so have the conversations surrounding backup and recovery.

At CYBERTEC, those conversations have been taking place across customer environments, community discussions, architectural reviews, and operational workshops for many years. The result is pg_hardstorage, a new open-source community project focused on PostgreSQL backup and recovery.

Click through for a quick overview, as well as links to the project homepage and GitHub repo.

Comments closed