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Category: T-SQL Tuesday

T-SQL Tuesday 199 Round-Up

Published 2026-06-22 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:

A good week ago I hosted the monthly T-SQL Tuesday blog party. I invited the community the blog about the idea of what would happen if we would need to go back on-premises, after a good decade of cloud computing. What would you need to do? How do you plan for this? What are the skills you might need to (re-)learn? You can find my take on this here, where I’m telling my junior colleagues that troubleshooting issues on-prem is more challenging, because it’s possible you need to go way down, all the way to Kerberos, SAN and DNS issues.

Click through for the contributions.

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On-Prem Is Still On-Prem

Published 2026-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword reminds us that it’s still the same animal:

Cloud solutions have sliders which magically reduce downtime, performance issues, and account credit. When you build it, infrastructure and platforms are your challenge, and you get one shot to right-size it. Capacity, resilience, capabilities. They’re your challenges to solve. There is no cake slider.

It’s the capabilities I want to consider here. The capabilities we have available to us day-to-day. Potentially two opposing sides:

To summarize things, everything is awful, just as it always has been. Granted, that may not be how Andy would summarize things, but that’s why I get those big Curated SQL bucks.

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Re-Migration and Data Engineering

Published 2026-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard shares some thoughts:

Right-sizing didn’t always work out the way some clients were led to believe it would.

In nearly every instance, the right-sizing argument was presented (sold) as the solution to over-provisioning, or purchasing hardware to serve peak loads. The classic example was a US income tax service that needed more and faster compute available to meet increasing demand starting in late January and peaking in mid-April each calendar year. After mid-April, hardware that was beefy enough to handle that peak load sat mostly idle for the next 9 months.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked for a company where this scenario really made sense. Even in the e-commerce company where a sizable fraction of our total annual revenues happened over a 5-day period, the load was still significant enough the rest of the year that we made good use of our on-premises SQL Server hardware.

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The Muddy World of Hybrid Environments

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Deborah Melkin muddies up the waters a bit:

My first reaction to this sentence was: Oh look, he assumes that everyone is in the cloud…

My next reaction was: Oh look, he acknowledged that maybe everyone isn’t in the clouds in his follow-up examples.

Since the cloud was introduced, the assumption was always going to be everyone will moving to the cloud. “You’ll be behind if you don’t learn the cloud,” they said. Then as people either moved or started looking into moving their databases, they realized they just couldn’t – whether it was due to missing features, higher than expected costs, etc. There was always some reason.

Click through for some of the challenges and realities of organizations where certain cloud-first or cloud-only services would be a major challenge, versus other services that are typically easier to deal with.

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Thoughts on a Cloudless World

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Mike Donnelly has some tongue-in-cheek responses:

There are some serious angles to this topic, and I have had conversations with people at conferences who are doing a remigration from the cloud, but it feels like the exception not the rule. It is interesting to think about. I spent most of my career working with on-prem SQL Server, but there was a period of about 10 years (the consulting years) where I didn’t touch anything that wasn’t in the cloud. The past several years have been working in a hybrid environment, but most of the work has been moving things to Azure and Fabric. Koen has some prompts for what our blog posts could be about, but rather than dive deep into any one thing I’m going to go with the blog writer’s best friend – a top 10 list.

The funny thing is, in my time as an on-premises DBA, I never dealt with hardware and didn’t have access to the server room.

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Gotchas for a Move On-Premises

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar lists three pain points:

For T-SQL Tuesday #199, Koen Verbeeck posed an excellent question: if your company moved up to the cloud, but after migrating, had to come back on-premises, what would be the big problems?

I’ve had clients in this exact situation! Here are some of my favorite gotchas from those experiences.

Click through for those three. I’d say that the first one is a major issue and will probably be one for the next couple of years—unless the bottom drops out sooner than I expect and we suddenly have a rush of used hardware from highly unprofitable organizations hit the market.

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Skills for Cloud-to-On-Prem Migration

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens focuses on a set of skills:

This month, Koen Verbeeck invites the blogging community to write about their thoughts on returning to on-premises. What could be struggles, things we have to re-learn, etcetera.

When I read the invite, it immediately sparked inspiration, because there are increasing rumours around cloud exits. People musing about ‘what if’. Some clients reference these questions, but so far no one has directly asked me one with the intent of moving forward with it.

Click through for Reitse’s thoughts.

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The Importance of Working with People

Published 2026-06-10 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Wilkinson hits migration from a different angle:

I haven’t written a blog post (here) in over 5 years, so what better time to start things back up than a T-SQL Tuesday? Big shout out to Koen Verbeeck for hosting this month, and picking a great topic: Back to on-prem?

As someone that just ended a 10+ year stint managing a hybrid environment, this topic is very near and dear to me. I went back and fourth on what to write about for this one. There are a lot of great topics. Reliability and observability almost won out but instead I landed on maybe an unexpected topic: soft skills.

Regardless of whether your company is fully on-prem, fully in the cloud, fully hybrid, or fully without a clue, Mark’s advice hits home. And is also one of those things I’ve struggled with.

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T-SQL Tuesday 198 Round-Up

Published 2026-05-19 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria wraps up another T-SQL Tuesday:

Thank you to everyone who participated in T-SQL Tuesday #198! When I wrote the invitation post, I intentionally kept the prompt broad because change detection looks different depending on your source system, your infrastructure, your data volumes, and what you need to do with the changes once you have them. The responses covered SQL Server internals, Microsoft Fabric and Synapse, hashing strategies, metadata-driven frameworks, and Synapse workspace diffing with Python. Here’s a summary of each contribution.

Read on for links to eight responses.

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Metadata-Driven Frameworks for Change Detection in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant builds a table:

I had various options for this months contribution due to my experience with various change detection solutions. Including Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022. Which I covered in previous posts. Including one that covered some excessive file tests for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022.

In the end I decided to cover developing metadata-driven frameworks for Microsoft Fabric. Due to the fact that it is such a hot topic for multiple reasons. One of which is the growing availability of open-source, metadata-driven frameworks for Microsoft Fabric.

Read on for three such frameworks and some advice on how to use them.

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