A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Michael Mayer gives us some changelogs:
Our two sister packages are continuously being improved. A brief summary of the latest changes:
Click through for brief updates on both, as well as two demonstrations of the libraries in action.
Leave a CommentA lot of new documentation was published recently around Fabric capacities, including documentation on how to size and govern capacities and how to troubleshoot problems with capacities. The latter has instructions on how to use the Capacity Metrics App to determine if your Power BI queries are being throttled; it mentions that you can also determine if queries have been throttled using Workspace Monitoring or Log Analytics but doesn’t go into details about how, something I will address in this post.
Read on to learn more.
Leave a CommentConsider a typical sales dashboard filled with charts, KPIs, and large tables.
Users often have to guess what is important, read legends, or ask questions like “What does this mean?” or “Which numbers require attention?”
Many dashboards display data but do not guide users to key insights effectively.
Read on for a few different possibilities based around conditional formatting.
Leave a CommentReitse Eskens tries out the new preview of SQL Server Management Studio 22:
We’re almost used to SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 21, and now 22 is already in preview. So, let’s see where it’s available for download, install it and see what’s different.
There’s not a huge amount of new functionality, and Reitse spends some time on the big one: that SSMS is moving from the Azure OpenAI integration that they introduced in SSMS 21 to a GitHub Copilot integration in 22, but it’s not in the preview just yet.
Leave a CommentDaniel Vérité checks the version:
With three locale providers (libc, icu and builtin), a PostgreSQL instance has potentially three different versions of Unicode at the same time.
When doing only store/retrieve or basic operations on UTF-8 strings, these versions don’t matter. Postgres checks that the bytes in the strings constitute valid UTF-8 sequences, but not whether the code points corresponding to these sequences are assigned or not.
It starts to matter when interpreting these code points as characters.
Read on to see which features might determine which Unicode provider you might be using.
Leave a CommentKoen Verbeeck takes a peek at a pair of new features in SQL Server 2025:
Often new T-SQL functionality is released first in the Azure cloud environment, before it makes its way to the on-premises SQL Server product. Recently, a new T-SQL function and operator went general available in Azure SQL DB (and Azure SQL Managed Instance): UNISTR and the ANSI SQL string concat operator (||). In this tip, we’ll introduce you to both concepts.
Koen looks at these in Azure SQL Database, though if you have the public preview of SQL Server 2025, you can try both out there as well.
Leave a CommentSebastiao Pereira is a mad lad and I love it:
Is it possible to have the DBSCAN algorithm in SQL Server without the use of external tools? If so, can you please provide a working example?
DBSCAN is a neat algorithm for clustering and it is reasonably popular in the literature. I cannot imagine that it would perform well at all in SQL Server on a large dataset, though in fairness, I did try out the Mail_Customers example Sebastiao noted. This dataset includes 196 rows after you eliminate four duplicate combinations of annual income and spending score, and the procedure returned in less than a second. Now, getting the execution plan for this took a while, but it was neat to see this working.
Leave a CommentMike Robbins shares some guidance:
Passive voice hides the actor, making instructions vague or more difficult to follow. Instead, use active voice to clarify who performs the action. Active voice includes any sentence where the subject performs the action (e.g., You run the script).
- Incorrect: When the font size is adjusted, the code becomes easier to read.
- Correct: If you adjust the font size, your code becomes easier to read.
Active voice makes instructions direct and actionable.
I hate passive voice enough that I would link to this post even if it were the only piece of advice on there. There are very specific good uses for passive voice in English, particularly when you do not know who the actor was and the actor does not matter. The rest of the time, people primarily use passive voice when they want to weasel out of something or avoid assigning blame. And most of the time, even when you think this you have a good use case for passive voice, you probably don’t.
Case in point: “Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination was a primary inciting factor for the Great War.” This is passive voice—we swapped a verb (assassinate) to a noun (assassination) in order to focus on the direct object at the expense of the subject. The general rule of thumb is that if you can ask “By whom?” when reading a sentence, there is a very good chance that the author used passive voice. And we may think at first that the actor does not matter, but I chose this example precisely because he does. In order to understand why the Austro-Hungarian government reacted the way it did, you have to know that the assassin was a Serbian nationalist, that the Russian government had a particularly close connection with Serbia, and that the Austro-Hungarian government had a very contentious relationship with the Balkans at that point (and I’m being kind by using the word “contentious” here). Granted, it’s not critical to fit all of this into the one sentence, but removing the subject turns into a game of “hide the ball” way too quickly.
In active tense, I’d rewrite the sentence to be something like: “A primary inciting factor for the Great War occurred when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.”
Leave a CommentBrendan Tierney tries out the SQL Firewall feature in Oracle:
SQL Firewall allows you to implement a firewall within the database to control what commands are allowed to be run on the data. With SQL Firewall you can:
- Monitor the SQL (and PL/SQL) activity to learn what the normal or typical SQL commands are being run on the data
- Captures all commands and logs them
- Manage a list of allowed commands, etc, using Policies
- Block and log all commands that are not allowed. Some commands might be allowed to run
Read on to see how it works. It’s an interesting approach that can supplement traditional firewall and web application firewall systems.
Leave a CommentBoniface Muchendu takes a peek at a fairly new feature:
Keeping your Power BI reports consistent, clean, and on-brand just got a lot easier. With the new Organizational Themes feature released in June 2025, Power BI now allows organizations to centrally manage and distribute custom report themes across all users. No more manual theme imports or scattered design standards.
Read on to see how it works, and hopefully your organization does not have terrible standards.
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