The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
SQL Saturday –> Day of Data
The first major topic of the night was an article from Steve Jones on the evolution of SQL Saturday. Steve has officially announced the new name, Day of Data. We talked a bit about this as well as SQL Saturday Raleigh 2026 (or Raleigh Day of Data 2026?). That’s coming up soon.
TriPASS Call for Speakers
In case you missed it, the TriPASS call for speakers for 2026 is currently up. We’re accepting submissions for our three groups: advanced DBA (virtual, 300-400+ level topics), the main meeting (general purpose, with a preference for speakers who can meet us in person), and data science/business intelligence/artificial intelligence (virtual).
Use Cases for PGlite
Mike hit me up before the show and asked for my thoughts on PGlite. I took a look at the website, speculated a bit on good uses cases, and compared it to a pair of other libraries I’m much more familiar with in SQLite and DuckDB.
DAX Lib: an App Store for DAX Functions
Mike also wanted to talk about DAX Lib, jumping off of a recent Curated SQL post. This leads to DAX Lib, a website hosted by the sqlbi team of Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari, and Kurt Buhler. The idea is to provide people with a repository for user-defined DAX functions that they can use and re-use in Power BI reports. I think it’s a neat idea and it does fit in nicely with sqlbi’s (paid) Tabular Editor 3 product.
Using FORMATMESSAGE
A member of chat asked us to end with a useful SQL tidbit for newbies, and that reminded me of a Louis Davidson blog post on using FORMATMESSAGE. This was built on a bit of yes-and development between Louis and me and I was able to show the audience the final product and how the FORMATMESSAGE() function can make this sort of string formatting considerably easier. At least, so long as you aren’t using date types (or don’t mind converting them to strings first).