Erik Darling has a new slide deck. This video focuses on how skewed data can potentially lead to parallelism not distributing the data on different CPU threads effectively. Erik demonstrates how you can identify this issue in practice, though solving the problem will come in a later video. It’s an interesting scenario and stick around for a poke at an argument Pedro Lopes has made.
Comments closedCurated SQL Posts
Hadi Fadlallah shells out to an API:
Data is usually the most important asset in organizations, but only SQL developers can frequently access that data. Technical teams often write queries for non-technical users. This restricts agility, slows decision-making, and creates a bottleneck in data accessibility. One possible remedy is natural language processing (NLP), which enables users to ask questions in simple English and receive answers without knowing any code. Still, the majority of NLP-to-SQL solutions are cloud-based, which raises issues with cost and privacy.
This particular solution has nothing to do with the embedding features in SQL Server 2025. Instead, it essentially shells out to an Ollama API and runs the resulting SQL query. It’s reasonably neat but I’d have so many qualms putting anything like this into production.
Comments closedSunitha Muthukrishna announces an update to an extension:
Manage Fabric items programmatically: Use item definitions to unlock scripting and work with your items as files. You can update and deploy Fabric items to existing workspaces or new workspaces directly from VS Code—saving you time and effort. Fabric items, that have Item definitions API support, support this capability.
Read on to see what else made the cut.
Comments closedJon Vöge has one landing page to rule them all:
In either scenario, we would of course like to solve this using 1 app with multiple screens, and dynamically open up different screens depending on a parameter.
We would not want to develop two almost identical apps, with governance on each app, just to be able to present different landing pages for each scenario.
So how do you do it? Read on below for the answer…
Click through for the scenario depictions as well as the answer.
Comments closedMichael Mayer gives us some changelogs:
Our two sister packages are continuously being improved. A brief summary of the latest changes:
Click through for brief updates on both, as well as two demonstrations of the libraries in action.
Comments closedA lot of new documentation was published recently around Fabric capacities, including documentation on how to size and govern capacities and how to troubleshoot problems with capacities. The latter has instructions on how to use the Capacity Metrics App to determine if your Power BI queries are being throttled; it mentions that you can also determine if queries have been throttled using Workspace Monitoring or Log Analytics but doesn’t go into details about how, something I will address in this post.
Read on to learn more.
Comments closedConsider a typical sales dashboard filled with charts, KPIs, and large tables.
Users often have to guess what is important, read legends, or ask questions like “What does this mean?” or “Which numbers require attention?”
Many dashboards display data but do not guide users to key insights effectively.
Read on for a few different possibilities based around conditional formatting.
Comments closedReitse Eskens tries out the new preview of SQL Server Management Studio 22:
We’re almost used to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21, and now 22 is already in preview. So, let’s see where it’s available for download, install it and see what’s different.
There’s not a huge amount of new functionality, and Reitse spends some time on the big one: that SSMS is moving from the Azure OpenAI integration that they introduced in SSMS 21 to a GitHub Copilot integration in 22, but it’s not in the preview just yet.
Comments closedDaniel Vérité checks the version:
With three locale providers (libc, icu and builtin), a PostgreSQL instance has potentially three different versions of Unicode at the same time.
When doing only store/retrieve or basic operations on UTF-8 strings, these versions don’t matter. Postgres checks that the bytes in the strings constitute valid UTF-8 sequences, but not whether the code points corresponding to these sequences are assigned or not.
It starts to matter when interpreting these code points as characters.
Read on to see which features might determine which Unicode provider you might be using.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck takes a peek at a pair of new features in SQL Server 2025:
Often new T-SQL functionality is released first in the Azure cloud environment, before it makes its way to the on-premises SQL Server product. Recently, a new T-SQL function and operator went general available in Azure SQL DB (and Azure SQL Managed Instance): UNISTR and the ANSI SQL string concat operator (||). In this tip, we’ll introduce you to both concepts.
Koen looks at these in Azure SQL Database, though if you have the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you can try both out there as well.
Comments closed