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Curated SQL Posts

The Costs of Implicit Conversion

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword changes things around:

Implicit conversion happens in SQL Server when the engine detects a mismatch in data types and automatically converts from one type to another. This can be helpful as it makes different types interchangeable and is generally transparent to the client, but it can come with issues.

Usually the downside from implicit conversion is seen through performance impact. But we’ve got something a little different today – an inconsistent result set.

Read on for Andy’s example.

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Customer Managed Keys in OneLake

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Harmeet Gill shows us how we can bring our own keys to data in OneLake:

One of the highly requested features in Microsoft Fabric is now available: the ability to encrypt data in OneLake using your own keys. As organizations face growing data volumes and tighter regulatory expectations, Customer-Managed Keys (CMK) offer a powerful way to enforce enterprise-grade security and ensure strict ownership of encryption keys and access.

With Microsoft’s OneLake, we’ve built a unified data lake that’s open, secure, and ready for enterprise scale. Now, with support for CMK, we’re giving customers the power to take encryption into their own hands.

Read on to learn more about Microsoft’s default for data encryption, and how you can use your own keys to encrypt the data.

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Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code Update

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Sunitha Muthukrishna has an update:

Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code enables users to manage Fabric items efficiently from within VS Code. We are announcing two new features for Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code that allow you to manage Fabric items directly within your workspace. These enhancements are based on customer feedback, and we welcome further input to improve this product.

Click through to see what’s new in the product.

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Index Maintenance for Large Databases

Published 2025-06-27 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Russell shares some thoughts:

Most database administrators are comfortable with the daily tasks of backup, CHECKDB, index maintenance, and statistics updates. The available guidance for those topics is extensive. Much less has been written about caring for estates that contain hundreds of databases—or a single database large enough to strain conventional maintenance windows. This post will focus on options that help when individual tables or complete databases grow beyond the point where “standard” maintenance jobs finish in a reasonable time.

Click through for Jon’s advice. My big thing is to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb fragmentation. Index fragmentation was very important back in the days of spinning disk, where accessing pages took much longer if you needed to move the disk head. With NVMe storage, all-flash arrays, and even more prosaic solid state drives, random access is typically at least as fast as sequential access, so there’s no real benefit to having pages of data be contiguous.

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What’s New in Microsoft Fabric, June 2025 Edition

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc has a big list for us:

The June 2025 Fabric update introduces several key enhancements across multiple areas. Power BI celebrates its 10th anniversary with a range of community events, contests, expert-led sessions, and special certification exam discounts. In Data Engineering, Fabric Notebooks now support integration with variable libraries in preview, empowering users to manage configuration values centrally for improved modularity and scalability.

Additional updates span Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, and Data Factory, with new features such as upgraded AI functions, enhanced real-time data capabilities, and improvements to data ingestion and security. These updates collectively aim to streamline workflows, boost performance, and foster greater collaboration across teams.

Click through for the full update.

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Building Entity-Relationship Diagrams with DBeaver

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Stokes builds a diagram:

Even the most experienced database professionals are known to feel a little anxious when peering into an unfamiliar database. Hopefully, they inspect to see how the data is normalized and how the various tables are combined to answer complex queries.  Entity Relationship Maps (ERM) provide a visual overview of how tables are related and can document the structure of the data.

Read on to see how you can do this with the DBeaver database access client.

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Choosing Fields to Hide in Power BI

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad has something up his sleeve:

To tidy up your Power BI solution, there are some options, and one of them is hiding fields from the report view. This option, although simple, has a significant impact on making your Power BI solution very tidy and clean and easier to maintain. However, you might wonder what are fields that have to be hidden in Power BI? In this article, I will explain how to hide a field in report view, and then what are fields which are a good candidate for this option. If you like to learn more about Power BI. Read Power BI book from Rookie to Rock Star.

The very short answer is, hide things that business users won’t (or shouldn’t) care about. Reza gives much more guidance on the topic.

Based on the comments section, this appears to be a re-post from several years ago, but still worth reading because the content is evergreen.

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Testing Database Backups with dbatools

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

David Seis performs a test:

In this blog post, we will audit the dbatools command Test-DbaLastBackup. I will test, review, and evaluate the script based on a series of identical steps. Our goal is to provide insights, warnings, and recommendations to help you use this script effectively and safely. Test-DbaLastBackup is a powerful tool to automate the validation of a backup. Backup testing should be a regular part of SQL Server maintenance and this command works well in automating this task.

Click through for a dive into the cmdlet. I’m a big fan of this cmdlet because it drastically simplifies the process of ensuring that your backups are good.

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Checking Disk Free Space on Mount Points in SQL Server

Published 2025-06-26 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins doesn’t need drive letters:

I have some SQL Servers and the  file system is organised with mount points. SQL Server is configured to distribute the system files , data , transaction log and tempdb files on those mountpints. As these are Production systems – the DBA does not have permanent access to the Disak Manager without a request for elevated privileges. But they do have privileges to execute administration type of queries. 

Do you have a query that allows the DBA to excute a query to determine the Total Size , Available Size and Space Free on the mountpoints 

Read on for the answer, as well as a link to an older article from Tom on the topic.

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