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Curated SQL Posts

Diagnosing DirectQuery Connection Limit Issues

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes troubleshooting:

To kick off my series on diagnosing Power BI performance problems with Performance Analyzer in the browser (which I introduced last week with my post on vide-coding a custom visual to visualise Performance Analyzer data), I want to revisit a subject I blogged about two years ago: how hitting the limit on the maximum number of connections to a DirectQuery data source can lead to queries queuing for an available connection and performance problems. In my original post on this topic I showed how you can use the Execution Metrics event in Profiler/Log Analytics/Workspace Monitoring to see when this queuing happens. In this post I will show how you can do exactly the same thing with Performance Analyzer.

Read on to learn how.

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Object-Level Security in Power BI

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Vin Mai Quang lays out an explanation:

For a POC project, my team lead asked me to practice and build a demo Power BI report that applied OLS (Object Level Security). Although it sounded simple at first, I was surprised by how OLS actually behaves in Power BI. In this blog, I would like to share my findings with you.

Click through for a demonstration of how it all works, including how to deal with scenarios in which customers shouldn’t get access to specific columns but should still be able to see others.

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The Year in DAX 2025

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo lays out a list:

This was a big year for DAX, with the public preview that started in September for two new features: user-defined functions (UDFs) and calendar-based time intelligence.

The user-defined functions are the most significant update to the DAX language since 2015, when Microsoft introduced variables. Can you believe that for more than five years we had to write DAX code without variables? Well, the user-defined functions we just mentioned will have an even bigger impact in the long term.

Read on for more information on key additions, new DAX functions, and all of the neat stuff that the SQLBI team put together this year.

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Tracking Database File Sizes via Powershell

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kyle Burwell wants to know how big the databases are:

Database files (mdf, nds, ldfs, etc.) can get out of hand quickly and easily, leading to issues down the road. This can be due to improper planning, large data loads, and bad code run in production, just to list a few. As unglamorous as disk space monitoring is, we need to do our part as DBAs. This post is a quick guide on how to track database file sizes with PowerShell.

Read on for a few scripts to perform the task.

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Creating a SQL Server 2025 Practice Environment

Published 2025-12-31 by Kevin Feasel

John Deardurff installs SQL Server 2025:

Microsoft SQL Server 2025 introduces major advancements in performance, security, and built‑in AI capabilities. Before you can start exploring its new features, you need to install it correctly. This guide walks you through the full installation process of SQL Server 2025, SQL Server Management Studio 22, and restoring the AdventureWorks2025 database to create a practice environment to test the new features and enhancements of this new release.

I was going to joke, “But John, what about your loyal Linux-using readers? How can we do this?” But instead, I’ll say that I’m glad that AdventureWorks is still alive and kicking. It is, on the whole, a nice demo database.

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Top Microsoft Fabric Features from 2025

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic builds an end of year list:

Microsoft Fabric just turned two a couple of weeks ago (at Ignite in November, to be more precise). As the product is still very much a “work in progress”, we have overseen literally hundreds of new features in the last 365 days. Obviously, not all of them are equally important – some were simply trying to fix the obvious issues in the existing workloads, or trying to catch up either with competitors or with some functionalities we had in the older Microsoft data platform solutions, whereas the others were targeting super niche use cases.

Therefore, in this article, I’ll try to distill what I consider the biggest announcements around Microsoft Fabric in 2025.

Read on for three caveats, followed by the list and quite a few additional nominees.

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Blogging for Programmers

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Louis Davidson has wrapped up a series of videos:

Today I finished up my first 24 videos in my Blogging for Programmers series of posts. I started out calling it vlogmas, but Tipmas definitely fits a lot better.

You can access the blogs about them here or go directly to the Youtube playlist here.
It was a lot of fun to do this series, and more will be coming in the new year at a much slower pace. I hope you enjoyed the series and/or learned something. The blogs each have a succinct version of the list of tips, so if you don’t have 5 – 10 minutes to watch a video, the main points are listed there.

If you’re interested in blogging, Louis has a lot of great tips across the 24 videos.

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Vectors and Columnstore Indexes

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Niko Neugebauer continues a series on columnstore indexes:

In this post we are going to test one of the more promising technologies in SQL Server-based offerings – Vector data types and its relationship with the Columnstore Indexes. The tests I am running right now are executed against SQL Server 2025 RTM, the latest and greatest SQL Server version available to customers. Given that some parts of the SQL Server 2025 were delivered as a Preview Features, the current situation might change in the future for SQL Server 2025 (at least, Half-precision float support should evolve into the fully supported feature, in my opinion). At very least, I do expect reasonably fast evolution of the space on Azure SQL Database & Azure SQL Managed Instance.

This seems like more pain than joy, which is the unfortunate reality of v1 features in SQL Server anymore.

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A Look at Fabric IQ

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some thoughts on Fabric IQ:

At Ignite in November, 2025, Microsoft introduced Fabric IQ. I noted to go beyond the marketing hype and check if Fabric IQ makes any sense. The next thing I know, around the holidays I’m talking to an enterprise strategy manager from an airline company and McKinsey consultant about ontologies.

Ontology – A branch of philosophy, ontology is the study of being that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. In computer science and AI, ontology refers to a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

So, what better way to spend the holidays than to play with new shaky software?

Read on for Teo’s standard format of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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