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Curated SQL Posts

Choosing the Right Extended Events

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey makes a choice:

For this blog post I want to focus on the last one, Event Overload. There really are a lot of events in Extended Events. I don’t just think that’s a good thing. I think it’s a GREAT thing. However, I get it. I hit the same problem, regularly. Which events do I use to do thing that I’m trying to do? Except for blogs like this one, there’s not always a lot of guidance on these things. Microsoft has (good) documentation on Extended Events in general, but not on every event, plus, not a ton of guidance. (some though).

Click through for Grant’s advice.

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Updates to OneLake Security

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill announces some upcoming changes:

This evolution of OneLake security is still in development. Over the next few months, we will be expanding OneLake security’s integration across the platform, adding even more robust capabilities, and boosting performance. Customers wishing to get an early look at these capabilities and provide feedback before the broad public preview, can sign up for the early access preview. Once we’ve enabled your workspaces, these new features will show up as new capabilities within OneLake data access roles.

Click through to see what’s on the list. The original promise of a single security model covering all data in Microsoft Fabric is still quite a ways away, though this is a step in the right direction.

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Microsoft Fabric March 2025 Updates

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc puts together a big list:

Welcome to the March Feature Summary!

From the innovative Variable library (Preview) to the powerful Service Principal support in the CI/CD features, there’s a lot to explore. Dive in and discover how the new Partner Workloads in Fabric bring cutting-edge capabilities to your workspace. Plus, enhanced OneLake security ensures your data is protected. And don’t miss out on the expanded regional availability for Eventstream’s managed private endpoints, making it easier for organizations worldwide to build secure, scalable streaming solutions.

With FabCon kicking off today, the announcements are rolling in! Get ready to explore these features and more in the March 2025 updates for Fabric!

FabCon triggered a large number of big announcements, and considering that the outline takes up about a page and a half, there’s a lot to dig into here.

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Generating Realistic Data with Data Diluvium

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Adron Hall wants to generate some realistic time-series data. First up is humidity data:

When working with TimeScale DB for time-series data, having realistic environmental data is crucial. I’ve found that humidity is a particularly important parameter that affects everything from agriculture to HVAC systems. 

Then comes temperature data:

Following up on my previous post about adding humidity data generation to Data Diluvium, I’m now adding temperature data generation. This completes the pair of environmental data generators I needed for my TimeScale DB setup. Temperature data is crucial for time-series analysis and works perfectly alongside the humidity data we just implemented.

Check out both of these for detailed coverage of how to generate realistic-looking simulated data.

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Finding Mismatched Rows in Power Query

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad looks for that other sock:

Finding rows that are in one table, but not the other is one of the most common scenarios happening in any data related applications. You may have customer records coming from two sources, and want to find data rows that exist in one, but not the other. In Power Query, you can use Merge to combine data tables together. Merge can be also used for finding mismatch records. You will learn through this blog post, how in Power Query you can find out which records are missing with Merge, and then report it in Power BI. To learn more about Power BI, read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

Click through for the video and article.

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Semantic Search in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Hans-Jürgen Schönig performs a search:

PostgreSQL offers advanced capabilities through extensions like pgvector, which enable semantic search at a level and quality never achieved before. Unlike traditional text search, which mostly relies on trivial string comparison, semantic search in PostgreSQL goes beyond keywords by understanding context and meaning, enhancing relevance.

The quick idea here is that converting words (or parts of words) into vectors can maintain most of the semantic meaning behind the words. Then, when we perform certain types of vector comparisons, we can take advantage of this semantic meaning and find results whose language is different from our query but the concept is a match for what we want. Click through for the full article.

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Building a Simple Microservice with Azure Functions

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Temidayo Omoniyi takes us through an example of creating a microservice:

Today’s architecture is serverless intensive, with multiple microservices performing a particular task. Industries are beginning to move away from traditional monolithic applications, which have a single large codebase infrastructure handling everything, to an easier microservice approach.

Click through for a primer on serverless architecture, microservices, and how to create a simple Python app that acts as a microservice.

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Backup Storage Billing for Fabric SQL Databases

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Amar Digamber Patil makes an announcement:

While compute and data storage are already included in the Fabric capacity-based billing model, after April 1, 2025, backup storage will also be billed. However, customers will only be charged backup storage that exceeds the allocated database size.

Click through to see what’s changing and how to get ahead of this. I’m not sure there are any ways to reduce that backup price, short of managing the data in your database and not having enormous amounts of transaction log activity.

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Source Control without a Budget

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Hill is looking out for tightwads like us:

Every DBA has been there. Trying to keep track of database schema changes while developers have their fancy Git repositories and version control workflows. Meanwhile, database changes are often handled through a mix of manual scripts, backups, and maybe a SharePoint folder full of “final_final_v2.sql” files.

Did you know that SQL Server already has a built-in tool that can help you track your database schema changes, without spending a dime on third-party tools?

I hadn’t thought about Kevin’s solution that way, but it does make a lot of sense as a way of quickly getting files into a source control repo.

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Finding Microsoft Fabric Administrative Documentation

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven digs through the docs:

Earlier I wrote about the default domain settings, changes to the default tenant setting value for SQL database and I also covered the (rights of the) Fabric Adminsitrator role. Today I want to talk about a more meta-topic: existing documentation on Microsoft Learn, and of course specifically for Admins.

It turns out that there’s a central link for this documentation within Microsoft Learn. Nicky also includes call to action to fix simple documentation issues (such as typos) that you find.

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