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Curated SQL Posts

Calendar-Based Time Intelligence and DirectQuery Performance

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb hits the Turbo button on his PC:

Calendar-based time intelligence (see here for the announcement and here for Marco and Alberto’s more in-depth article) is at least the second-most exciting thing to happen in DAX in the last few months: it makes many types of time intelligence calculation much easier to implement. But as far as I know only Reid Havens, in this video, has mentioned the performance impact of using this new feature and that was for Import mode. So I wondered: do these benefits also apply to DirectQuery mode? The answer is on balance yes but it’s not clear-cut.

Click through to see what Chris found.

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An Overview of Fabric IQ

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Brian Bonk talks ontologies:

If you followed along with the announcements from Microsoft Ignite, you might have stumbled upon the new Fabric IQ service.

For many people, this new service can seem a bit strange to see the point in, so in this blogpost I will try to help you understand the usage and business value of the new service.

Ontologies aren’t new—it’s mostly a metadata management exercise—but there are several companies (like Palantir) pushing this hard in their tools, and Microsoft is working that market segment. But instead of using all of this metadata management for data quality or master data management reasons, it’s for feeding into language models.

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Thoughts on CPU Optimization and SQL Server Licensing

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Brendan McCaffrey cuts some cores:

Minimizing CPU core counts is a perfect example of how to add value, and is arguably one of the easiest ways to do so.

I run this exercise in my environments about every six months, typically right before true-up time and again at mid-year, just to make sure we haven’t drifted too far.

Read on to see what Brendan does.

This next bit is weird for me to write because I’ve always been an Enterprise Edition snob. But another tip that I have is to take a very serious look at Standard Edition. If you’re using SQL Server 2025, you can have up to 32 cores and 256 GB of RAM in your buffer pool. Taking a look at the available features, losing online index (re)builds and superior availability groups sucks, but it’s not the end of the world for most shops. If you have large enough databases to really benefit from online index rebuilds, read-ahead scans, merry-go-round scans, batch mode on rowstore, and the like—generally, data warehouses or large OLTP instances with heavy read workloads—then those could benefit from Enterprise. But the cost in terms of lost functionality has decreased considerably in the past decade.

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The Basics of Framing in Window Functions

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover wants a range:

In this article, we’ll explore the concept of framing in window functions. We’ll compare the differences between the ROWS and RANGE clauses and discuss when to choose one over the other. We’ll also highlight common pitfalls of framing and whether it applies to all types of window functions. By the end, you’ll better understand how framing works with window functions, making it seem less complex.

Click through for a primer on frames in window functions. Admittedly, if I were writing this article, I’d toss out most of the “pitfalls” section, as pitfalls 2 and 3 aren’t particularly relevant or pitfall-y (because SQL Server always defines a frame on a window function if you don’t). Instead, I’d add that there are some annoying limitations on RANGE frames, where the ANSI SQL standard allows you to use intervals like date or time when defining frames, so you can get records ranging from three hours ago to right now, for example.

But that said, it’s a good overview if you’re fairly new to window functions.

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OPENROWSET and External Tables in Fabric SQL Databases

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Hugo Queiroz makes a connection:

Data Virtualization brings to Fabric SQL Database the same set of capabilities already available on Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server, customers can now use OPENROWSET and External Tables, with complete parity across SQL flavors, develop once deploy anywhere. Data Virtualization for Fabric SQL Databases directly supports Parquet and delimited text (CSV), but JSON files can also be read using functions like JSON_VALUE and OPENJSON.

This is currently in preview. Read on to see what’s in the preview.

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Common Star Schema Mistakes

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Richardson gets back to basics:

Sometimes the culprit isn’t actually your DAX, it’s your data model.

Star schema mistakes are incredibly common in Power BI, and really hard to track down.

When your data model isn’t a clean star schema, you end up with broken filters, confusing relationships and slow visuals.

It’s important to get it right from the start! So we broke down the top 10 most common mistakes people make, how to identify them and how to fix them!

This is where reviewing (or reading) Ralph Kimball’s Data Warehouse Toolkit can save you a lot of time and stress. The Microsoft data analytics world is predicated so heavily on Kimball-style dimensional modeling that the choices tend to be building a proper star schema up-front or spend processing and developer time trying to fix it in post-production using DAX or trickery.

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Log Truncation in Distributed Availability Groups

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Randal phones a friend:

This is a question that came in through email from a prior student, which I’ll summarize as: with a distributed availability group, what are the semantics of log truncation?

As I’m not an AG expert (I just know enough to be dangerous ha-ha), I asked Jonathan to jump in, as he is most definitely an AG expert! I’ll use AG for availability group and DAG for distributed availability group in the explanation below. Whether the AGs in question have synchronous or asynchronous replicas is irrelevant for this discussion.

Read on for the answer.

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Orchestration Options in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens moves some data:

Well, unless you enjoy waking up every night to start your Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process and manually running each process to do some work, it’s a smart move to automate this. Also, make sure everything always runs in the correct order. Additionally, there are situations where processes need to run in different configurations.

All these things can be done with what we call orchestration. It may sound a bit vague now, but we’ll get to the different moving parts of this, like parameterisation and pipelines.

Read on for a primer on the topic.

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