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Author: Kevin Feasel

Keeping Documentation Narrow

Published 2025-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Lukas Eder advises against expansive feature cross-pollination in documentation:

Every product manager knows this situation:

  • A user works with feature X1.
  • They find a limitation / bug / quirk and want to work around it.
  • The perfect workaround or alternative is feature X2, but without knowing that X2 exists, the user doesn’t find it and spends a lot of time looking for it.
  • The user requests X2 be documented on X1, because that would have saved them a ton of time.

This is such a common pattern, and while it’s perfectly understandable for such a user to request this, it is so terribly wrong to give in to this user’s request. Why is it wrong?

Read on for the answer.

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Default Tenant Settings Changes in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven notices a change:

In case you have access to the M365 Admin Center, or more specific the M365 Message Center, you might have seen this message. I reckon not many people did.. That’s why I’m blogging about it here

I’m specifically talking about this message in the Message Center, being a major update and with admin impact: 

Communications on default checkbox changes on tenant settings and billing start for SQL database in Fabric.

Read on for more information about what’s changing.

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Common Reasons for Emergency SQL Calls

Published 2025-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill compiles a list:

If you are a production DBA (or Accidental prod DBA) you’ve gotten that frantic call in the middle of the night. Or maybe during little Suzy’s soccer game? Something broke, alerts are firing, nobody can order your widgets and the help desk tech has no idea where to start.

I’ve been on call since 2006. These are the most common things I’ve been called for at the worst times:

Read on for Kevin’s list. It’s a good one. I also get my share of “replication broke” but fortunately for most people, replication is pretty uncommon in environments.

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Looping through bcp Calls in Powershell

Published 2025-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Peter Schott needs to perform a series of bulk inserts:

Sometimes you need to extract a large number of tables into some other format. I’ve written about BCP earlier as a quick option to move data around, but what if you need a delimited text file or a way to repeat the calls without too much trouble across a set of servers? I had this come up recently and wrote up a combination of PowerShell, the sqlserver module, and the bcp.exe tool to allow for a variety of extract types and also, importantly, ensure that we get header data with those extracts in case we need them to pull in to another process. This is doable without the header piece, but many processes (and humans) expect some sort of header data. Thus – a slightly expanded process.

Click through for a script and an explanation of the process.

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Multi-Tenant Data Isolation Strategies

Published 2025-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Rahul Miglani comes up with a list:

As organizations embrace cloud computing, multi-tenancy has become a popular architectural choice, enabling multiple customers (tenants) to share a single cloud environment. However, one of the biggest challenges in multi-tenancy is data isolation—ensuring that each tenant’s data remains private, secure, and accessible only to authorized users.

Microsoft Azure provides several data isolation strategies that allow businesses to securely manage and scale multi-tenant applications while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2.

In this blog, we will explore key data isolation strategies in multi-tenancy Azure architecture, their advantages, and best practices for implementation.

Reading through the list, the same set of options are available on-premises, though the calculus can be a bit different.

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Spark Connector for Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Arshad Ali announces a connector:

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Fabric Spark connector for Fabric Data Warehouse (DW) in the Fabric Spark runtime. This connector enables Spark developers and data scientists to access and work with data from Fabric DW and the SQL analytics endpoint of the lakehouse, either within the same workspace or across different workspaces, using a simplified Spark API. The connector will be included as a default library within the Fabric Runtime, eliminating the need for separate installation.

Click through to check out its capabilities. This is a tiny step toward where I think Microsoft Fabric should go: any tool accessing the same data, eliminating separate lakehouses vs warehouses and having to remember that you can’t use this syntax in this scenario unless you connect to it this way and sacrifice one live chicken.

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Seeding an Availability Group via T-SQL Snapshot Backup

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino jump-starts an availability group:

In this post, the fifth in our series, I want to illustrate an example of using the T-SQL Snapshot Backup feature in SQL Server 2022 to seed Availability Groups (AGs) with storage-based snapshots. Efficiently seeding an Availability Group is essential for maintaining high availability and ensuring effective disaster recovery. With the introduction of T-SQL Snapshot Backup in SQL Server 2022, snapshots can now be created at the storage layer. This advancement significantly speeds up the initialization of secondary replicas, particularly in environments that handle large databases.

This post will walk through a PowerShell script that effectively seeds an AG using T-SQL Snapshot Backup, dbatools, and Pure Storage FlashArray.

Click through for the script and the process.

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Debugging SSIS Packages

Published 2025-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword wrote code with an error in it:

When constructing or investigating a SSIS package we can run into a variety of issues. To help resolve there are various techniques which can be used to troubleshoot the package.

Whilst we have the Progress tab for the package to tell us what’s happened during execution, it’s usually more effective to debug packages in flight. Below we’ll look at a few ways we can achieve this:

Never having written code that doesn’t work perfectly the first time, this post is, of course, merely academic for all of us perfect developers. But for those people who may have let a little something sneak in or have to deal with the errors that others have seeded into our beautiful programs, Andy provides three separate techniques for troubleshooting packages in flight.

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