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Curated SQL Posts

PostgreSQL Query Tuning for the Oracle DBA

Published 2025-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman continues a series on PostgreSQL for Oracle DBAs:

As an Oracle DBA venturing into the world of PostgreSQL, one of the most important areas to get comfortable with is performance tuning. While Oracle’s Cost-Based Optimizer (CBO) is a well-known powerhouse that many DBAs have learned to both respect and wrestle with, PostgreSQL offers its own sophisticated query planner that behaves differently.  Understanding these differences is key to becoming proficient with PostgreSQL as we step into tuning.

Read on to gain an overview of what options are available on the PostgreSQL side and how they differ from what’s available in Oracle.

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OneLake Security Updates

Published 2025-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill shares some news:

It’s been almost 3 months since we announced OneLake security at FabCon 2025 in Las Vegas, and while the interest has not slowed down, we’ve also been working behind the scenes to improve the feature and address your feedback. In this blog post, we’ll go through some of the latest updates on OneLake security including further support for OneLake shortcuts, improved RLS authoring, and updated permissions to manage OneLake security.

Read on to see what has changed.

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PBKDF2 in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea has my interest:

I’ve written previously about auditing or cracking SQL Server login passwords either online (inside the instance itself) or offline (exporting the hashes and using a specialized cracking tool).

Last week, Microsoft’s Pieter Vanhove published a blog post that covers What’s new in SQL Server 2025 security.

This is one of the few instances in which I’d prefer things be slower in the database.

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Building State Transitions as SQL Constraints

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Celko makes a change:

About two decades ago, I introduced the concept of transition constraints to show Data Validation in a database is a lot more complex than seeing if a string parameter really is an integer. In October of 2008, I did an article called Constraint Yourself! on how to use DDL constraints to assure data integrity. One of the topics in that piece was a look at state transition constraints via an auxiliary table.

Read on for an interesting dive into the topic.

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Tableau with Microsoft Fabric and Row-Level Security

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley expands beyond the Microsoft ecosystem:

Tableau led the self-service visual reporting revolution and now part of the Salesforce suite, it is bound to continue to have a loyal following and user base. The purpose of this article is not to compare Tableau to Power BI nor to expound on the strengths or perceived weaknesses of either product, but to share my experience and learnings about using Tableau with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI semantic models. I will demonstrate how to use Tableau with a Direct Lake semantic model, a large import mode semantic model and how effectively Tableau works securely with semantic model-based row-level security (RLS).

Read on for Paul’s findings. I do appreciate Paul’s ecumenical approach here. It’s fun to pick your favorite sports team (yay, Team SQL Server!) and razz fans of other teams (boo, Team Oracle!). And given how often I do just that, I can’t begrudge anyone the pleasure. But it’s also good to remember that tools deserve no loyalty except inasmuch as they provide value to you.

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Inline Scalar UDFs in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Srdjan Martin has an announcement:

SQL native Scalar user-defined functions (UDFs) in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse and SQL analytics endpoint are now in preview.

A scalar UDF is a custom code implemented in T-SQL that accepts parameters, performs an action such as complex calculation, and returns a result of that action as a single value.

I wonder if the same advice for SQL Server will apply to these: don’t use them because they are performance sinks. Knowing that these are scalar functions, I’d be inclined to do some considerable performance testing before rolling them out.

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It’s Always Permissions (or DNS)

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kristina Mishra takes us through troubleshooting a problem:

Ah, you’ve setup a deployment pipeline and let your people know it’s ready for them to do the thing. Everything looks fine on your end, so you shoot off a message to the group and go about your busy day. (Nevermind your Test environment was set up 4 months ago, Production 3 days ago, and Development was replaced 2 months ago with a new Development environment because your region changed.) You’ve added all the permission groups to each environment and added your “contributors” as Admin to the deployment pipeline (no comment), so everything should be grand.

Famous last words, indeed.

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Choosing a High Availability Solution in PostgreSQL

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq compares two alternatives:

When designing a highly available PostgreSQL cluster, two popular tools often come into the conversation: Pgpool-II and Patroni. Both are widely used in production environments, offer solid performance, and aim to improve resilience and reduce downtime; however, they take different approaches to achieving this goal.

We often get questions during webinars/talks and customer calls about which tool is better suited for production deployments. So, we decided to put together this blog to help you understand the differences and guide you in choosing the right solution based on your specific use case.

Click through for a primer on the topic, followed by some recommendations.

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Accessing Delta Lake via Spark Connect

Published 2025-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has some code for us:

I have just finished an update for the spark connect dotnet lib that contains the DeltaTable implementation so that we can now use .NET to maintain delta tables, over and above what we get out of the box by using DataFrame.Write.Format("delta"), this is an example of how to use the delta api from .NET:

Click through for the example, and you can learn more about Spark Connect from the Spark website and Ed has a .NET client for the task.

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Transaction Control and Locking in PostgreSQL vs Oracle

Published 2025-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kellyn Gorman continues a series on PostgreSQL for Oracle DBAs:

Now that we finished Part 2 on physical data structures, storage and processes, it’s time to work our way into transaction control, locking and just a smidgen of performance insight.

This post is for Oracle DBAs who want to understand PostgreSQL’s transaction and locking mechanics, as well as how to monitor and tune performance without diving into execution plans just yet. Think of this as your quick-reference mental shift guide from Oracle to PostgreSQL.

Read on for some of the differences in the platforms.

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