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Curated SQL Posts

Fabric Warehouse CU Metering and Workloads

Published 2026-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic digs into the numbers:

If you are using Microsoft Fabric, you’ve probably received the same email notification as me:)

I’m talking about the one about Fabric Data Warehouse and SQL analytics endpoint metering.

Starting in August 2026, Warehouse CU consumption is moving away from the current per-query CPU-time model and toward a per-workspace, virtual-node time model.

Read on to see what will change and how that should affect the way you think about this infrastructure.

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The Basics of Query Folding with Power BI

Published 2026-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword explains one performance improvement technique for Power BI data transformations:

As a database developer, when I started using Power BI, I was concerned about it retrieving reams of data only to perform transformations downstream. The Power Query editor misleads us into thinking the retrieval and transformations are applied sequentially.

Thanks to Query Folding, that’s not usually the case. And that gives us more power to extract performance from the database.

This only works in situations where there’s something downstream to perform that processing, like a relational database. And one of the areas where you can affect performance, either positively or negatively, is in organizing operations such that you have a stretch of foldable operations. That way, all of it can run as one operation in the database.

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sp_Check Tool Updates for June 2026

Published 2026-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci has a list of updates:

Anyhow, we have a few months’ worth of updates for our FREE sp_Check stored procedures, so here are the June updates. And not only do we have more updates and checks for you, our repos now feature enhanced README files that have even more helpful information as well as a listing of every check in each stored procedure. Yes, really!

We hope these new updates can help make your job even easier, especially at proactively identifying issues. Here are the updates for June 2026, with links to the GitHub repositories where you can download the latest versions.

Click through for the changelog and links to where you can grab the procedures.

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Reviewing the Power BI Date Picker

Published 2026-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev takes a look at a new preview:

The June release of Power BI Desktop includes a preview of a new Power BI slicer configuration – Date Picker. It’s meant to solve two issues with report design.

Read on to see what those two issues are and how this new date picker can resolve them. It’s still in preview, so you’d have to change the settings in Power BI Desktop. And I imagine it won’t be available in Power BI Report Server because those people (including me) can’t be trusted to have nice things.

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Using REMOVEFILTERS in DAX UDFs

Published 2026-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari make use of REMOVEFILTERS:

A DAX user-defined function, also known as a UDF, is expected to return a scalar or a table. However, because functions are fundamentally macro-expansion of DAX code, it is possible to return CALCULATE modifiers if the function is to be called only as a filter argument of CALCULATE.

To show a practical example of when the feature proves to be useful, we debug a measure that fails because some calendar filters are not being removed correctly. Fixing the measure elegantly requires creating a function that removes filters rather than returning a value.

Click through for that example.

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Controlling Memory Grants in SQL Server

Published 2026-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a new video:

So we’ve got this query here that I have pre-run because it takes a little bit to run. And I don’t want to stand here in the hot, light heat while I wait for all this. This query will ask for quite a big memory grant, both because it is written in a way with this derived join, which will force us to run this query and produce a result.

And two, because we are selecting all of the columns from the comments table, one of them being a column called text, which is in InvarCar 700. So just to sort of get ahead of things a little bit, this query asks for an 11 gig memory grant. If you want to fix a big memory grant, you have three basic things you can do for any given query.

Click through to learn what you can do.

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Master Database Compatibility Level

Published 2026-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci explains an issue:

We were attempting to install a troubleshooting stored procedure in the master database of a SQL Server 2016 instance when we received the following error.

Msg 195, Level 15, State 10, Procedure sp_ShootTheTrouble, Line 227 [Batch Start Line 7]

‘TRY_CONVERT’ is not a recognized built-in function name.

This was unexpected, as TRY_CONVERT has been a command since SQL Server 2012. As a consequence, we were unable to install the stored procedure.

Tracking system database compatibility levels is a minor chore but an important one after an upgrade.

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TheseusPlot 0.3.0 Released

Published 2026-06-29 by Kevin Feasel

Koji Makiyama announces an update to an R package:

TheseusPlot is an R package that decomposes differences in a rate metric between two groups into subgroup-level contributions and visualizes the results as a “Theseus Plot”.

For example, when a click-through rate, conversion rate, or retention rate differs between two time periods or groups, TheseusPlot helps answer questions such as: which subgroup contributed most to the difference?

I love the name and I think the plot concept is interesting, especially in the e-commerce context that Koji describes. H/T R-Bloggers.

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