Press "Enter" to skip to content

Curated SQL Posts

Generating Excel Reports via Fabric Dataflows Gen2

Published 2026-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb builds a report:

So many cool Fabric features get announced at Fabcon that it’s easy to miss some of them. The fact that you can now not only generate Excel files from Fabric Dataflows Gen2, but that you have so much control over the format that you can use this feature to build simple reports rather than plain old data dumps, is a great example: it was only mentioned halfway through this blog post on new stuff in Dataflows Gen2 Nonethless it was the Fabcon feature announcement that got me most excited. This is because it shows how Fabric Dataflows Gen2 have gone beyond being just a way to bring data into Fabric and are now a proper self-service ETL tool where you can extract data from a lot of different sources, transform it using Power Query, and load it to a variety of destinations both inside Fabric and outside it (such as CSV files, Snowflake and yes, Excel).

Click through for an example.

Leave a Comment

Calculating Net Present Value and Internal Rate of Return in T-SQL

Published 2026-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastiao Pereira is back with more calculations:

Many organizations store cash-flow data inside SQL Server and decision-makers often need metrics like Net Present Value (NPV) and Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to evaluate those cash flows. Is it possible to calculate NPV and IIR values in SQL Server without the use of external tools?

These are quite easy to pull off in Excel and a bit more complex in T-SQL. Though with Net Present Value, in particular, I’m pretty sure I could rewrite it not to use the cursor.

Leave a Comment

Finding a Burrito in Ireland

Published 2026-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski has my attention and my interest:

A while back I posted about a couple of side projects that I’ve been working on when I get the chance. One of those was the Burrito Bot…a bot to make burrito recommendations in Ireland 🙂

Over the last 18 months or so I’ve reworked this project to utilise the new vector search functionality in SQL Server 2025…so now it looks like this: –

Andrew also owns the burrito-bot.com domain, as he showed it off live during his presentation at Data Saturdays Chicago. Unfortunately, it seems the service is not up at the moment, so your best bet might be to take the code from the Burrito Bot GitHub repo and build your own.

Leave a Comment

User-Defined Types in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey dives into functionality:

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say, sometimes I get sidetracked. In this particular instance, I hadn’t intended to start learning about User-Defined Types (UDT) in PostgreSQL – I just wanted to test a behavior that involved creating a UDT. But, once I started reading, I was hooked. I mean, four distinct UDTs with different behaviors? That’s pretty cool. Let’s get into it.

Read on to learn more about why there are so many user-defined types in Postgres. Looking at the list, I do really like what they have available. You can, of course, replicate the functionality otherwise (e.g., check constraints on a regular column for DOMAIN, foreign key link to a lookup table for ENUM), but it’s nice to have those types right there for clarity of design and so you don’t accidentally forget to apply an appropriate constraint.

Leave a Comment

Tips for tempdb Resource Governance

Published 2026-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis shares a few tips:

Someone runs a massive SELECT INTO #temp, tempdb fills the drive, and the entire instance freezes up dead. You get paged at 2 AM, kill the session, shrink the files, and spend the next day writing a monitoring script that you hope will catch it next time.

SQL Server 2025 finally lets you stay ahead of this. The Resource Governor can now cap how much tempdb space a workload is allowed to consume. Exceed the limit and SQL Server kills the query — not the instance. How cool is that? It’s like proactive DBA-ing without the DBA.

Click through for a primer on how to enable Resource Governor, how to alter the default workload group to set a cap on tempdb disk space utilization, and some things to keep in mind if you do use this feature of SQL Server 2025.

Leave a Comment

Protecting the SSMS Server List

Published 2026-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard provides an update:

Twelve years ago 🤯 I wrote a quick post about never losing your server list in SSMS again. The short version was: copy one file, stay sane. The file was called SqlStudio.bin, and the trick still works today if you are on an old enough version.

But if you are running SSMS 19, 20, 21 or 22 on Windows 11, the file is gone. The settings have moved, and the format has changed. The principle is the same, but the file you need to grab is different.

Here is the updated version for 2026.

Click through to see what changed starting in SSMS 19, as well as how to manage that file.

Leave a Comment

PSBlitz Updates

Published 2026-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea has a changelog:

For anyone not familiar with PSBlitz: it’s a PowerShell-based tool that outputs SQL Server health and performance diagnostics data to either Excel or HTML, and saves execution plans and deadlock graphs as .sqlplan and .xdl files.

If you’re familiar with Oracle, this is pretty much my attempt of a SQL Server equivalent to Oracle’s AWR report.

Click through for updates, screenshots, and one breaking change.

Leave a Comment

Hyperthreading and SQL Server Licensing

Published 2026-03-30 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Obbish provides a warning:

Azure VMs with hyper-threading enabled are sized according to logical cores instead of physical cores. These logical cores can perform with 50% of the power of physical cores for high levels of activity but will always perform at 100% of the SQL Server licensing cost rate. As a result, moving from a busy on-premises SQL Server VM sized to an Azure VM with hyper-threading enabled can result in a surprise SQL Server licensing bill.

Joe couches this in terms of Azure, but the licensing effect is the same for on-premises hosts as well. Hyperthreading is better than not in most scenarios, though “busy with CPU-heavy SQL Server queries” is one of those exceptions. And Joe is absolutely right right SQL Server’s per-core licensing means that you really want to bias toward physical cores versus hyperthreaded cores.

Leave a Comment

Tips for Performance Tuning SQL Server

Published 2026-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal provides a framework:

There are a huge number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, server settings, coding practices, wait types, and so on that can affect performance. For this post I decided to step back a bit from a list of specifics and list some general recommendations for how to approach performance tuning so that you maximize effort and minimize distractions.

Click through for several recommendations to make your performance tuning operations a bit smoother. None of these relate to specific performance problems. Rather, the post serves as some recommendations around how to approach performance tuning in general.

Leave a Comment

Building the Well-Architected Framework for Fabric

Published 2026-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Joey D’Antoni applies Azure principles to Microsoft Fabric:

Let’s take a step back and talk about why I built this session. Like it or not, Microsoft’s intention with Fabric (and Power BI before it) is to make it easier for less-technical business users to build and consume data-driven reports. While I understand this mission, and it has been wildly successful in spreading love for Power BI, despite Fabric’s software-as-a-service branding, it’s actually a fully fledged data engine that needs to be well-managed to ensure data governance, security, and adherence to general best practices. In building my demos, I created a sample workspace with a couple of objects.

Click through for more notes on Joey’s talk, as well as a link to the code.

Leave a Comment