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Author: Kevin Feasel

Install and Configure SSIS 2025

Published 2026-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck performs an installation:

We’re an on-premises shop running all our services on our own machines. We’re planning to migrate to SQL Server 2025 and there are some older SSIS projects we might need. Is SQL Server Integration Services still supported in SQL Server 2025? If yes, how can we install it on our server? Do we still need Visual Studio to develop projects and packages, and how can we convert the older projects?

Granted, SSIS hasn’t exactly changed a lot with SQL Server 2025, but it’s there for you.

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Generating a Set of Sequential Numbers Redux

Published 2026-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson needs even more sequential numbers:

I thought I was done, nice quick little throwaway piece, but I went a little more in depth than I planned. Then Aaron Bertrand messaged me about a post that I had forgotten (even if I did edit it :)), where he was introducing GENERATE_SERIES (GENERATE_SERIES: My new go-to to build sets). In it, he had included a method of doing this using a method that replicates digits and then uses STRING_SPLIT and ROW_NUMBER to generate more digits. He also noted that it was blistering fast.

Aaron (if you know him) is rarely wrong about SQL (at the very least).

I also realized there was one other thing I wanted to add to my tests, that being just selecting from a Numbers/Tally table that has a billion rows. This should be the fastest way to pull a set of numbers.

Read on for one hundred million results. And check out Brent Ozar’s comment on getting things in descending order.

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The Troubles of Documentation: Microsoft Fabric API Edition

Published 2026-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell walks through a recent experience:

Firstly, an apology to my friends (especially Randolph) in the documentation team at Microsoft. I know how hard you work to produce accurate and useful documentation, and I appreciate your efforts. This is not a criticism of your work, but rather an observation about the challenges I faced.

This is a story about a recent experience and the lessons learned along the way.

Read on for the issue and what Rob had to do. This is a case study in how hard it is to write good documentation, especially around the edges of what is possible.

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Combining Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Notebooks, and Spark Structured Streaming

Published 2026-02-06 by Kevin Feasel

Arindam Chatterjee and QiXiao Wang show off some preview functionality:

Building event-driven, real-time applications using Fabric Eventstreams and Spark Notebooks just got a whole lot easier. With the Preview of Spark Notebooks and Real-Time Intelligence integration — a new capability that brings together the open-source community supported richness of Spark Structured Streaming with the real-time stream processing power of Fabric Eventstreams — developers can now build low-latency, end-to-end real-time analytics and AI pipelines all within Microsoft Fabric.

You can now seamlessly access streaming data from Eventstreams directly inside Spark notebooks, enabling real-time insights and decision-making without the complexity & tediousness of manual coding and configuration.

Click through to learn more.

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More Spark Jobs, Fewer Notebooks

Published 2026-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Miles Cole lays out an argument:

I’m guilty. I’ve peddled the #NotebookEverything tagline more than a few times.

To be fair, notebooks are an amazing entry point to coding, documentation, and exploration. But this post is dedicated to convincing you that notebooks are not, in fact, everything, and that many production Spark workloads would be better executed as a non-interactive Spark Job.

Miles has a “controversial claim” at the end that I don’t think is particularly controversial at all. I agree with pretty much the entire article, especially around the difficulties of testing notebooks properly.

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Building a Better .gitconfig

Published 2026-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Colin Gillespie digs in:

Getting started with Git is easy (ha!), but once you’ve mastered the basics, it’s natural for developers to start thinking about customising their git process. Most Git settings live in the .gitconfig file. In this blog post, I’ll discuss what you should consider setting in your config file to make a more efficient development environment.

There are some interesting settings that I hadn’t heard of, but I could see making sense.

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SSMS Updates and Code Completions

Published 2026-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar wants an update:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, SQL Server Management Studio was included as part of the SQL Server installer.

Back then, upgrading SSMS was not only a technical problem, but a political one too. Organizations would say things like, “Sorry, we haven’t certified that cool new SQL Server 1982 here yet, so you can’t have access to the installer.” Developers and DBAs were forced to run SSMS from whatever ancient legacy version of SQL Server that their company had certified.

Working in a controlled industry, I still get to hear that answer.

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Offline Installation of SSMS 22

Published 2026-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Nivritti Suste grabs the bits:

Beginning with SQL Server Management Studio 21, Microsoft stopped providing the direct download package/binaries to install SSMS, instead it just downloads the SSMS installer. This installer then starts the installation of SSMS and downloads what is needed to install SSMS. Sometimes there may be a need to do an offline installation where you do not have access to the internet. In this article, we walk through the steps to do an offline install of SSMS.

I would have been curious about how large the installation folder is, considering that it grabs all possible options.

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Trying the Regex-Based Replace Function in Excel

Published 2026-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson checks out a new function:

Instead of building up a few different text functions on top of each other, you can now use regex inside Excel formulas to search for patterns, and clean data much more efficiently.

Our favourite of these new additions is REGEXREPLACE, which lets you find text based on patterns and replace data in one simple formula.

Read on to see how the REGEXREPLACE() function works.

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Dealing with NULL and Empty String in Multiple RDBMS Platforms

Published 2026-02-05 by Kevin Feasel

Akhil Reddy Banappagari compares three popular platforms:

When you are planning database migrations to PostgreSQL, it is usually the small things that cause the biggest production bugs. One of the most common traps for developers is how different databases handle NULL and empty strings ('').

While they might seem like similar concepts, representing the absence of a value, the way a database engine interprets them can change your query results, break your unique constraints, or cause data loads to fail. In this guide, we will compare the behavior of Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL to help you avoid common migration pitfalls.

PostgreSQL and SQL Server are close in the way in which they deal with NULL and empty strings, but all three platforms have at least some differentiation, so if you’re deeply familiar with one, the next platform may trip you up a little.

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