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Curated SQL Posts

Changing Power BI Dashboard Themes by Toggle

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Valerie Junk demonstrates a process:

In this tutorial, I will recreate a project I built last year: a mini Power BI dashboard with a toggle button to change its appearance. When you toggle the button, the background color changes, the logo and snow switch images are updated, and the visuals are restyled accordingly (including the color of the trees). 

This project combines different tutorials I created in the past, which cover dynamic color changes and the lollipop visual.
At the bottom of this page, you will find a step-by-step video, and you can download the file from the download page.

Click through for instructions, the video, and a zip file to work from.

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Sequence Integer Overflows and BIGINT in PostgreSQL

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Laurenz Albe performs a migration:

In a previous article, I recommended using bigint for sequence-generated primary keys (but I make an exception for lookup tables!). If you didn’t heed that warning, you might experience integer overflow. That causes downtime and pain. So I thought it would be a good idea to show you how to monitor for the problem and how to keep the worst from happening.

Read on for the downtime-rich solution (thanks to table blocking), as well as a solution that requires less downtime.

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Working with Git in SSMS 22

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Calbimonte answers a question:

In SSMS 22, there is Git integration to manage SQL code versions and repositories. How do you use this functionality?  Can you walk through a step-by-step example?

I’ll admit that I’m not too wild about using Git in SSMS. I don’t have anything against the idea, but I’ve always used separate tools like Visual Studio and VS Code for project and source control management.

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Microsoft Fabric Eventstream Pricing

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Anasheh Boisvert puts on the green eyeshade:

In this blog post, we’ll walk through Eventstream’s pricing model to give you a clear understanding of how it works and help you navigate it with confidence.

By the end of this post, you will be able to:

  • Comprehend how Eventstream pricing is structured across its components.
  • Understand the relationship between Eventstream components and billing meters.
  • Review detailed pricing examples to support precise and confident cost estimation.

Read on for a breakdown of the components and several examples.

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IOPS Slider in Azure SQL Managed Instance Next-Gen

Published 2026-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

John Morehouse cranks that slider to the right:

If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to boost memory or I/O, you had to scale the whole instance, paying for extra CPU you might not need—and hoping the upgrade fixed the bottleneck.

It worked but wasn’t elegant and could be slow or awkward. Scaling sometimes took hours when time was of the essence.

The Next-Gen Azure SQL Managed Instance marks a major shift from the old model. It was way overdue.

The downside is that there’s still a per-CPU hard cap on IOPS and it’s low. Granted, it’s only about two orders of magnitude lower than what I’d expect from a decent on-premises solution, but that’s still enough to limit severely my ability to recommend SQL Managed Instance to anybody.

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Using REGEXP_LIKE in SQL Server 2025

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover dives in:

Microsoft added several new features in SQL Server 2025, including an exciting suite of regular expression (regex) functions. After years of anticipation, there’s no longer a need to rely on CLR to use regex capabilities. As an experienced SQL developer, I enjoy finding specific rows, and the function that stands out to me is REGEXP_LIKE. I was drawn to it by its name, mainly because I frequently use the LIKE predicate. Right now, we are deciding whether to use it.

Read on for the results of Jared’s testing.

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Two Ways of Using Source Control

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Mark Seemann notes that there are two very different approaches to source control:

Git is such a versatile tool that when discussing it, interlocutors may often talk past each other. One person’s use is so different from the way the next person uses it that every discussion is fraught with risk of misunderstandings. This happens to me a lot, because I use Git in two radically different ways, depending on context.

Should you rebase? Merge? Squash? Cherry-pick?

Often, being more explicit about a context can help address confusion.

I know of at least two ways of using Git that differ so much from each other that I think we may term them two different regimes. The rules I follow in one regime don’t all apply in the other, and vice versa.

Click through for depictions of both methods and how they differ.

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Accessing a Variable Library from a Microsoft Fabric Notebook

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Graham-Brown continues a series on variable libraries in Microsoft Fabric:

This post walks through how to access a variable library in a notebook in Microsoft Fabric. I recommend a Microsoft Fabric project starts by creating a variable library to store the common values different artifacts need and could be changed if a deployment pipeline gets involved. So when we create a notebook we need to be able to use these variables. This means we need load the variable library in a notebook and then get the variable values.

Read on for two ways to retrieve information on variables, as well as some recommendations around naming.

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Performance Analysis of Geocoding in Power BI

Published 2026-01-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb grabs the map and pushpins:

When a user complains about their Power BI report being slow it’s normal for the developer to open up DAX Studio and start tuning the measures in the semantic model because 95% of the time the problem is the DAX. But there’s a whole class of report performance problems that are nothing to do with the semantic model or DAX and they are the ones that are much easier to troubleshoot now that Performance Analyzer is available in the browser as well as Desktop. Today I want to look at one of them: geocoding in map visuals.

Click through for a demonstration and a few tips to help limit the pain of geocoding large amounts of data.

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