Microsoft Purview data governance best practices
Microsoft Purview can be the best data governance tool in the world, but it will still be useless if people do not know it exists, do not trust the...
2026-06-04
27 reads
James Serra's Blog
Deciphering Data Architectures Is Now Available in Multiple Languages
Since the release of my book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh, I’ve been fortunate to hear from readers...
2026-06-02
10 reads
Understanding Fabric Ontology
What problem is Fabric Ontology trying to solve? For years, most data conversations have started with tables. We ask where the data lives, what columns are available, how the...
2026-05-22 (first published: 2026-05-20)
99 reads
Understanding Fabric MCP
Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is one of those technical ideas that sounds more complicated than it really is. The easiest way to think about it is this: MCP...
2026-05-20 (first published: 2026-05-04)
412 reads
GenAI vs Dashboards: Not the Same (And Never Will Be)
There’s a question I’ve been hearing more and more lately, especially as Copilot, Fabric, and Fabric data agents become part of everyday conversations with customers: will GenAI replace reports...
2026-05-06 (first published: 2026-04-23)
306 reads
The OneLake catalog in Fabric: Explore, Govern, Secure
Once your Fabric tenant grows past a few workspaces, data discovery gets weird fast. Duplicates multiply. People stop trusting what they find. And security teams start hearing things like,...
2026-04-14
17 reads
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference
A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon Atlanta 26) last week (see the FabCon keynote here). There were 8000 attendees! Here...
2026-04-08 (first published: 2026-03-26)
1,080 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #196 Roundup: What career risks have you taken?
I hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation in which I asked, “What career risks have you taken?” I got some great responses which I’ll recap here, Career risks? Rob...
2026-03-17
5 reads
Semantic Model Power Query vs Dataflow Gen2 in Fabric
In my recent blog post, Building Power BI Reports: Desktop vs Fabric, I talked about the evolving authoring experience in Microsoft Fabric and how report development is increasingly moving...
2026-03-09
50 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #192: What career risks have you taken?
I’m honored to be hosting T-SQL Tuesday — edition #192. For those who may not know the history, T-SQL Tuesday started back in December 2009 when Adam Machanic (Blog |LinkedIn)...
2026-03-03
11 reads
Blogs
From SQL Saturday to Day of Data
By ReviewMyDB
A behind-the-scenes look at Day of Data Jacksonville 2026, the transition from SQL Saturday,...
PostgreSQL 18 Finally Makes BUFFERS the Default. Here Is Why That Matters
You run EXPLAIN ANALYZE on a slow query, stare at the plan, and something...
A New Word: La Guadière
By Steve Jones
la guadière – n. a glint of goodness you notice in something that you...
Forums
non ascii columns in a utf-8 .txt file
hi, we couldnt get our upstream data source developers to supply what is sometimes...
PolyBase Trace Flags
Are there any good articles on all the trace flags that are enabled on...
The Data Model Matters
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Data Model Matters
Question of the Day
Running SQLCMD I
I run the SQLCMD utility as follows:
lcmd -S localhost -EI then type this (the 1> is the prompt):
1> select @@version goIf I hit enter, what happens? See possible answers