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Curated SQL Posts

Building an Isolated Hyper-V Network for Azure Communications

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Jordan Boich continues a series on networking for the DBA:

Before I even touched anything related to Azure, I needed to make sure that nothing I did could impact my Wi-Fi at home. The whole reason why I love home lab environments so much is because it is contained end to end. If I break something in my lab, it’s comforting to know that nothing important will ever be in that blast radius. This post is all about hitting the prerequisites that don’t touch anything important like setting up an isolated lab network, save points for my existing VMs, license checks, and creating an Azure subscription that doesn’t touch anything else.

Read on to see what Jordan did.

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Connecting Azure Databricks to a Microsoft Foundry AI Gateway

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Furgiuele connects the dots:

While some people might look at the different capabilities and think this is an “either/or” scenario, the reality is that most Azure customers are going use (or even need to use) both: developers building apps and agents in Databricks, for example, may want to leverage a model or other agent deployed in Foundry. Meanwhile, developers in Foundry may need to call a Databricks managed MCP service.

These types of calls aren’t all that difficult; in fact, both platforms provide built-in connectors or UI solutions to make this happen: simply provide the service endpoint, pick your authentication method, and you’re pretty much done. However, the introduction of the respective gateways, especially on the Foundry side, can make this just a little more complicated. Let’s look at one example.

Click through for that issue and how Drew was able to work around it.

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Creating an Azure DevOps Deployment

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens deploys some Microsoft Fabric assets:

Let me generalise first: you can essentially choose two options to promote your hand-crafted and superior code compared to anyone else from development to production. The first way is to use the Fabric deployment pipelines. These are essentially copy actions that move the development state to production. Option two is to use either GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps pipelines.

The main issue I’ve seen with the Fabric deployment pipelines is that the deployed code still references the development environment. This results in your notebook running in production and happily writing the results in the development lakehouse. To mitigate this, you can add actions to the Fabric pipeline, check out the newly announced Fabric deployment plans, or remember to update all references.

Click through for a high-level depiction of the process.

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Testing Immutable SQL Server Backups

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Warwick Rudd tries to make a change:

In Part 1 we built an immutable container. In Part 2 we gave the SQL Server 2025 VM a Managed Identity and Microsoft Entra authentication. This is where it comes together. We’ll keep the traffic between SQL Server and storage on the private network, lock down who can reach the storage account, give the VM permission to write, and then take a backup and try to delete it.

Read on for those steps.

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Skipping Incompatible Objects in Bacpac Restoration

Published 2026-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Ejlskov Jensen shares some good news:

If you have ever tried to export a SQL Server database to a .bacpac file with sqlpackage, you have most likely run into the dreaded SQL71627 error, complaining about a Windows user or login. I ran into it myself a few years ago, and the only workaround was to drop the offending users from the database (or a copy of it) before running the export.

With sqlpackage 170.6.28-preview, that workaround is no longer needed. The Export action has two new properties that let you remove objects that are not compatible with Azure SQL Database while exporting, and write a report of what was removed.

Click through for a demonstration.

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What’s the Time Again?

Published 2026-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Umachandar Jayachandran checks a watch:

Affected locations in British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba will not turn their clocks back at 02:00 local time on November 1, 2026. They will remain at UTC−07:00, UTC−06:00, and UTC−05:00, respectively. 

Microsoft’s interim guidance for British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba describes the new Windows time zones and temporary workarounds. 

SQL Server on Windows requires the applicable Windows update—not a separate SQL Server product update. For SQL Server on Linux, Azure SQL Database, and Azure SQL Managed Instance, the following guidance applies when the new regional time zones are not yet available in your deployment. 

Click through if you have anything in that latter bucket.

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Disabling FileStream and FileTable on a SQL Server Instance

Published 2026-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Stephane Haby turns off a feature:

A customer recently asked me to disable FileTable/FileStream on their instance because the databases no longer use it, and to ensure that this is indeed the case.
The aim is to migrate to a new architecture without FileTable/FileStream in a second time.

The tricky bit is that the relevant database is also inside of an Availability Group. Click through for the process.

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Comparing JSONB to hstore in Postgres

Published 2026-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Hubert Lubaczewski re-creates an issue:

Some time ago I read this blogpost.

They wrote about logging changes to table using a trigger, but one thing that caught my attention was:

Storing only the changed columns made the log five times smaller and the trigger slower.

Figured I can try it myself…

Unfortunately they didn’t provide schema of table, nor test updates. So, let’s make test case:

Click through for the demo, and how a change from JSONB to hstore for changed data improved performance a fair bit.

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Rebuilding pgbuild

Published 2026-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Page digs into a repo:

My job at pgEdge allows me a significant amount of time to work on pgAdmin, a project I started nearly 30 years ago. The previous blog and this followup is an update on some of the recent work I’ve been doing.

In my last post I wrote about moving pgAdmin’s build farm from Jenkins to GitHub Actions, and I promised a follow-up about pgbuild, which is the least famous repository in the pgAdmin organisation and quietly one of the most important. If you have installed pgAdmin on Windows in the last year or so, or on macOS since the move to GitHub Actions, you ran code that came from the buildfarm.

Click through to learn more about this base repository, as well as one significant problem they fixed.

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