A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Tomaz Kastrun demands accuracy:
We have all seen colourful signposts with great cities and their distances – how far each is from this current standpoint.
And fundamental question is, how correct these distances are? Or even, one should ask, how honest a particular signpost is, regarding the current standpoint.
Click through to see how you can calculate this distance.
Leave a CommentNikola Ilic noodles a concept:
If you’ve been working with data platforms in recent years, chances are that you’ve implemented the medallion design pattern (or architecture:)) at least once. Bronze, silver, gold – raw, cleansed, curated – this design pattern has become so widely adopted that you’ll find it in every reference architecture, every certification exam, and every conference talk (including some of mine, I have to admit). And, in the vast majority of implementations I’ve seen (and built myself), all three layers are physically materialized as tables.
In this article, I’d like to challenge that habit. Not the medallion pattern itself – the logical separation of layers is, in my opinion, still of paramount importance. What I want to question is something much more specific: why is the silver layer a set of physical tables? And, with the recent announcement of GPU acceleration for the Fabric Data Warehouse, I believe this question deserves a serious answer, rather than “because that’s how the diagram looks”
Click through for Nikola’s thoughts, including when it might work for the silver layer to be virtual and when it doesn’t make sense.
Leave a CommentEmad Al-Mousa describes a denial of service mechanism:
Denial of service attack is one of the common cyber security attacks that will cause interruption, outage and potentical finanicial and operational damages. So, its very nasty attack that attackers use for damage intent.
The main problem here is that any sql server database login (user) can create temporary tables in TEMPDB database and no specific permission is required to be granted to this account in the first place. Also, there is no way (I am currently aware off) that restricts a database login from temporary tables creation.
Prior to SQL Server 2025, I’m not sure of a great way to prevent this attack, assuming the attacker has access to run arbitrary queries against your instance.
Leave a CommentVlad Drumea builds a local version of Azure SQL Database:
Microsoft has recently released in private preview (at the time of writing) the Azure SQL Database container image.
This is Microsoft’s solution for folks who want to build and test Azure SQL DB native software without having to incur additional Azure costs just for dev/test/demo work.This provides a local option for developers who want to work on products that require Azure SQL DB’s specific developer surface: T-SQL, drivers, and engine behavior.
Click through to see how this works. As of right now, you’ll need to be in the private preview, but I imagine things won’t change significantly once they move to public preview.
Leave a CommentJon Lunn has a series with the first two parts up. First up is part one:
Developing in Microsoft Fabric within a multi-team environment has not always been straightforward. Fabric was initially geared more towards individual users and citizen developers working independently within a workspace, which created challenges when applying traditional source control and DevOps practices.
Part two covers integration with Azure DevOps:
Now we’re going to look at deploying Fabric items through DevOps using the Microsoft-supported Fabric CI/CD Python library.
- Set up DevOps components
- Environments
- Libraries
- Creating an DevOps YAML deployment pipeline
- Creating a Fabric CI/CD script to deploy the items
- Using AI Tools to help speed up development of DevOps
Stay tuned for part three.
Leave a CommentPaul Brebner digs into a protocol:
The Agent2Agent (A2A) object model defines the core building blocks that enable AI agents to discover one another, exchange messages, execute long-running work, and deliver durable outputs. The primary A2A objects are agent cards, messages, parts, tasks, and artifacts. Together, they provide a standardized foundation for AI agent interoperability across frameworks, platforms, and programming languages
This post focuses on A2A — specifically the nouns of the protocol: who participates, and what data objects carry meaning. Part 3 will cover how agents discover each other, send work, and deliver updates.
Click through to learn a bit more about the A2A protocol, as well as the major object-level components that make up a solution.
Leave a CommentThierry Moudiki looks at an R port of a Python package:
Keep in mind that this package is for Machine Learning hyperparameter tuning: the global minimum won’t always be found, but this isn’t an issue, since it means you aren’t overfitting the training set.
It’s ported the same way as nnetsauce for R was: with
uvto create an isolated Python virtual environment containing the PythonGPoptpackage, andreticulateto call into it from R. Every function in this R package is a thin wrapper that returns the underlying Python object; the general rule is: object accesses with.’s in Python are replaced by$’s in R.
Click through for the instructions and examples of how it works. H/T R-Bloggers.
Leave a CommentGilbert Quevauvilliers has a video:
How to use Microsoft Purview Protection Policies so a Fabric workspace Admin can still fully administer the workspace… but is completely blocked from seeing any of the sensitive data inside it.
You keep the person as Admin (so they can manage items, permissions, capacity, etc.) while the protection policy + sensitivity label combination simply removes their ability to open or view the protected Lakehouses, Notebooks, etc.
Click through for the video.
Leave a CommentLouis Davidson tries out a new feature:
A feature I have been trying to find time to write about since it arrived is Optimized Locking, which first shipped in SQL Server 2025. This is a feature that changes the way SQL Server locks manages concurrency in a very interesting number of ways. Most of which, as I start writing this blog, I don’t understand. And I probably won’t when I finish.
What I can promise you is an example rich blog where I examine the impact of this feature.
Read on to see what Louis was able to learn.
Leave a CommentBut what’s also strange here, too, is that SQL Server estimates one row very reliably for a date bucket. So, you know, you might be careful about that as well, especially if you’re returning far more than one row. You might be unhappy with the one row estimate.
It might bring you back to the bad old days of table variables and off histogram values, stuff like that. But, yeah, anyway, I had a point with all that. Let’s do this.
Click through to learn Erik’s point.
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