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Author: Kevin Feasel

Sharing Power BI Reports across Tenants

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi does a bit of sharing:

In this post, we’ll focus on a practical scenario. One organisation, let’s call it Tenant A, wants to share a Power BI report with someone from another organisation, Tenant B. We’ll cover everything from verifying licenses to configuring the Fabric Admin Portal and inviting the external user. If you’re looking to follow along, this guide will give you a clear path to replicate the same setup in your environment.

Click through for the process.

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Working with Memory-Optimized tempdb

Published 2025-06-03 by Kevin Feasel

Haripriya Naidu deals with metadata contention:

This feature is specifically designed to reduce metadata contention. Note that adding data files will not resolve metadata contention, as that addresses a different type of contention.

You can learn more about enabling this feature and its benefits here.

A company I used to work for was a perfect candidate for this, except that the limitations meant that we couldn’t actually use it. We ended up switching some of our most frequently recurring temp tables and table-valued parameters to memory-optimized user-defined table types and got us out of our metadata contention mess without using this feature.

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Performance Testing ZSTD Backup Compression

Published 2025-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino gives SQL Server’s new backup compression format a try:

SQL Server 2025 introduces a new compression algorithm, ZSTD (Zstandard), which can help with database backup performance. The implementation of ZSTD gives you more control over your backup performance in terms of CPU consumption and backup runtime. I recently ran some rough benchmarks comparing ZSTD, and its three compression levels, with the existing MS_XPRESS algorithm, and the results are compelling and give you some additional tools for managing performance for database backups.

Click through for Anthony’s test and findings.

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Creating a SQL Server 2025 Container

Published 2025-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea tries out SQL Server 2025:

This post covers creating SQL Server 2025 containers in Podman, Qnap Container Station, and sqlcmd, and restoring a sample database to test the new version.

One important thing to remember is that all SQL Server 2025 containers are based on the Linux build of SQL Server. For 90% of tasks (give or take), that won’t matter, and you’ll still have a good time trying out the new version of SQL Server and make sure things still work in your databases the way you expect them to. But some functionality (e.g., merge replication) is not available in Linux and other functionality (like PolyBase or Machine Learning Services) has a very different installation process.

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Split-Brain Scenarios in PostgreSQL Clusters

Published 2025-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq knows that an application cannot serve two masters:

In this blog post, we will try to explore a critical failure condition known as a split-brain scenario that can occur in PostgreSQL HA clusters. We will first see what split-brain means, and then how it can impact PostgreSQL clusters, and finally discuss how to prevent it through architectural choices and tools available in the PostgreSQL ecosystem

Click through for an explanation of split-brain and what can cause this problem. Additionally, Semab includes several tips on how to limit the likelihood of a split-brain scenario occurring.

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psql Meta-Commands

Published 2025-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ian Parker shows off some meta-commands:

If you manage PostgreSQL from a terminal you already know psql, the interactive client that ships with every installation. Most developers use it for the basics—running SELECT statements, loading a .sql file, maybe poking around with \dt to see which tables exist.

Beneath that familiar surface, though, psql hides a rich toolbox of meta-commands. These commands, all prefixed with a backslash, live inside the client. They’re not SQL, they’re shortcuts built into psql itself, and they can make everyday tasks faster and far less error-prone.

Read on for six of these, including examples like \watch to view something with periodic refresh.

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HA/DR in Oracle with Data Guard

Published 2025-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman takes a peek at Oracle Data Guard:

In its traditional, (and free) configuration, Oracle Data Guard operates in an active/passive architecture.  This incredibly well-designed and valuable solution from Oracle which comes included with the Enterprise Edition has as part of its architecture:

  • A primary database, which is an active, accessible database system.
  • One or more standby databases, which are passive replicas that continuously receive redo data from the primary.

Click through for an overview of the product.

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The Challenges with Sharing Power BI Reports with External Users

Published 2025-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi begins a new series:

Are you a Power BI developer or someone in a BI or finance team who needs to share reports with customers, partners, or vendors? If they are not part of your Microsoft 365 tenant, things get a bit more complex than just clicking the “Share” button.

This is a common need, especially in consulting scenarios, but doing it securely and correctly takes more than people often think. It involves both technical setup and a clear understanding of roles and terminology.

This post lays out the groundwork for the rest of the series, so stay tuned for more.

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