Author: Kevin Feasel

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mala Mahadevan
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

SQL Saturday Raleigh Recap

The first major topic was our SQL Saturday recap. I spent a bit of time talking about the event, as well as trying to provide some advice for people interested in running their own events. I didn’t have anything scripted out, so it probably came out as a jumbled mess, but them’s the breaks on Shop Talk.

Stack Overflow and Its Discontents

Our other major topic was around the decline in fortunes for Stack Overflow. We talked a bit about it, and what has likely replaced it: a combination of LLMs and Discord servers. That’s not a long-term stable solution (and I don’t think Reddit is the answer, either), but I mentioned the challenges of keeping a forum-style website going over a long time: you have people who form part of the institution, and as they age out or leave, it’s hard to keep things going. I expect that, over the long term, we’ll have something similar again. And admittedly, Stack Overflow isn’t dead, though it is on the ropes.

But hey, at least the Stack Exchange people know what will fix their problems: rebranding.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mala Mahadevan
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

SQL Saturday Raleigh

Our big news is around SQL Saturday Raleigh, which we’ve officially launched. It will take place on May 17th at Duke Health in Durham. You can register at the SQL Saturday website. There are free tickets that do not include lunch, and paid tickets that include lunch. We will not have lunch available for sale on the day of the event.

We’re also hosting Brent Ozar for a pre-con the day before. You can sign up for this on Brent’s website.

Azure ML SDK/CLI v1 Deprecation Notice

Microsoft has announced that the Azure ML Python SDK v1 will officially go away on June 30th of 2026, and the az cli AML extension v1 will go away in September of 2025. We talk a little bit about what that means, and the upgrade guide that Microsoft has provided. I also teased a video that will drop next week, on April 29th.

Iceberg vs Delta Lake

Our other major topic was a comparison of Apache Iceberg vs Delta Lake. This was a topic Mike wanted to know more about, and I happened to read (and curate) a great comparison of the two products from Maria Zakourdaev, whose name I clearly cannot pronounce. Maria does a great job of laying out the pros and cons of each platform and I highly recommend checking out that article if you’re interested in Iceberg.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mala Mahadevan
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

SQL Saturday Raleigh

Our big news is around SQL Saturday Raleigh, which we’ve officially launched. It will take place on May 17th at Duke Health in Durham. You can register at the SQL Saturday website. There are free tickets that do not include lunch, and paid tickets that include lunch. We will not have lunch available for sale on the day of the event.

We’re also hosting Brent Ozar for a pre-con the day before. You can sign up for this on Brent’s website.

The State of Microsoft Fabric

I used a very lengthy Patrick LeBlanc blog post covering Microsoft Fabric updates as a springboard for quite a few pent-up thoughts around Microsoft Fabric. I want to thread that needle of “This is going to be really cool two years from now” without pretending that the product is more than it currently is.

Oracle Admits to Data Breach

The final article comes from Mala: Oracle has admitted to a data breach in their cloud Gen1 platform.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

SQL Saturday Raleigh

Our big news is around SQL Saturday Raleigh, which we’ve officially launched. It will take place on May 17th at Duke Health in Durham. You can register at the SQL Saturday website. There are free tickets that do not include lunch, and paid tickets that include lunch. We will not have lunch available for sale on the day of the event.

We’re also hosting Brent Ozar for a pre-con the day before. You can sign up for this on Brent’s website.

ETL, ELT, and PowerShell

Our primary question for the day came in via e-mail from a viewer:

I currently use PowerShell scripts to pull data from source APIs for my company’s data pipelines. Our BI department is nascent, thus our scripts are mostly just pulling data and loading it into a tabular format in SQL Server. We don’t do much in the way of transformations. This has caused issues with large memory grants and implicit conversions in our SQL Server.
I’m curious if PowerShell is an appropriate or even adequate tool for performing transformations? If not, what other options are there?
We are trying to keep as much “processing” as possible outside of SQL Server to reduce licensing costs.

Mike and I spend a bit of time talking about viable options, areas of focus, and industry trends.

The QUALIFY() Clause and Its T-SQL Equivalent

Mike wanted to know about the QUALIFY() clause that exists in Teradata and Snowflake. I talk a bit about its purpose and reference a Stack Overflow post that shows some T-SQL equivalents. QUALIFY() looks pretty neat and I certainly wouldn’t mind it being available to us in T-SQL, but I won’t hold my breath on it, as there are functional alternatives.

A Minor Rant about Oracle Date Formatting

Our other topic of the night was a rant from Mike about how Oracle’s date formatting functions are annoying. I have a tiny amount to add, but this was mostly Mike’s time to shine.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mala Mahadevan
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

SQL Saturday Raleigh

Our big news is around SQL Saturday Raleigh, which we’ve officially launched. It will take place on May 17th at Duke Health in Durham. You can register at the SQL Saturday website. There are free tickets that do not include lunch, and paid tickets that include lunch. We will not have lunch available for sale on the day of the event.

We’re also hosting Brent Ozar for a pre-con the day before. You can sign up for this on Brent’s website.

Handling Large Data Exports

Mike brought up our next topic: what are some tools and techniques for handling large-scale data export from databases for data scientists? We talked a bit about classic ETL tools like Informatica, SQL Server Integration Services, and Ab Initio. I also talked a bit about file formats, dealing with Parquet files as a standard whenever possible, and more.

Red Gate 2025 State of the Database Landscape

The final topic had us look at the highlights of Red Gate’s 2025 State of the Database Landscape. The full report is available but I stuck to the notes on Red Gate’s website. If you want the full report, go check it out.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mala Mahadevan
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

Notes on NOLOCK

Mala sent in the first link, an article from Joe Fleming regarding NOLOCK. In it, Joe makes the argument that ceteris paribus, NOLOCK is not a good thing, but that there’s little to no value in eliminating it in an environment. I agree with the former and strongly disagree with the latter. Along the way, we talk for a bit about Read Committed Snapshot Isolation as the solution in most circumstances.

2025 Data Professional Salary Survey Results

The other point of discussion was Brent Ozar’s 2025 Data Professional Salary Survey results. I popped open Excel and did a little bit of pivot table work. We talked a bit about data cleanliness, salary extremes, trends, and why mean can be misleading for things like salary.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mala Mahadevan
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

TriPASS Elections

Our TriPASS elections have wrapped up and our intrepid board members have survived for another two-year term.

Mala’s Thoughts on PASS Summit 2024

Mala then talked a bit about her experiences from PASS Summit 2024. She’s been traveling for a bit and this is her first episode back, so we had a chance to catch up with her a bit.

Thoughts on SQL Server 2025

We spent a lot of time this episode on SQL Server 2025, talking about some of the new functionality based on what we heard at Ignite in 2024 and thoughts for how this affects data engineers. Along the way, I generated a cocktail napkin level drawing of how vectorization works and we spent quite a bit of time talking about the new JSON data type and how this is a bit of a reversal from “the XML data type was a mistake and we should just keep JSON in NVARCHAR” thoughts in the past.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

TriPASS Elections

It’s election season for TriPASS and we have a slate of electors up for vote. If you are a TriPASS member, you’ll have received an e-mail about this.

The Power of Anti-Semi-Joins

I learned something from Erik Darling. I’ve learned many things from Erik Darling, but this one was around NOT EXISTS versus 0 = (SELECT COUNT(*)...). It turns out that SQL Server has an optimization that makes both return the same execution plan. After the recording, I went and checked Postgres, which does not have the same optimization. This is yet another case of how behaviors in one platform may subtly differ from others.

Approximate Functions

Mike successfully side-tracked me and we talked a bit about the three approximation functions in SQL Server: APPROX_COUNT_DISTINCT, APPROX_PERCENTILE_CONT, and APPROX_PERCENTILE_DISC. I explained a bit about how they work, linked to some of the original academic papers, and described the difference between the continuous and discrete functions.

Tenant Switching in Microsoft Fabric

Our final topic of the night was from a Koen Verbeeck blog post, covering tenant switching in Microsoft Fabric and the Power BI Service. This is another example of the classic Microsoft pattern of developing something without designing in the ability to switch tenants / subscriptions / accounts.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

TriPASS Elections

It’s election season for TriPASS and we have a slate of electors up for vote. If you are a TriPASS member, you’ll have received an e-mail about this.

Common Table Expressions

A question came in from chat:

Hi Kevin, I got a question as a beginner in SQL. When I am writing queries that requires a combination of joins inside multiple CTE’s, I get a timeout error in my application. Individually, the CTE’s work, and work until a number of CTE’s are joined. Is there a way to optimize this type of query?

Mike and I talked a bit about the topic and dug in further. The good news is that the chatter followed up with me afterward and we did, in fact, help with this problem. There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.

SSMS 21

Our other topic was what’s coming in SQL Server Management Studio 21. We talked about blog posts from Brent Ozar, Reitse Eskens, and Vlad Drumea. Along the way, I outed myself as a Light Mode beacon of brilliance.

The Recording

The Panelists

• Kevin Feasel
• Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

TriPASS Call for Speakers

The TriPASS 2025 call for speakers is open. We are accepting sessions for all three of our groups: the advanced DBA group (2nd Tuesday of each month), main meeting (3rd Tuesday of each month), and data science & business intelligence group (4th Tuesday of each month).

Why SQL Server vs PostgreSQL?

Our topic for the night was from Alex. Repeating the question:

In a recent shop Talk Mike Chrestensen mentioned that he is working on a project to migrate from Oracle to SQL Server. I’m curious what led him to choose SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL or some other open source ($0 licensing cost) DBMS.

Mike talked about the specific circumstances around his company. From there, I dove into the topic and explained my reasoning for why someone might want to choose SQL Server or PostgreSQL. I didn’t use the obvious “We’re already using this technology” answer, but instead focused on some of the key items in favor of each. I also talked about a bit of history at a prior employer.

An Overview of HammerDB

We also talked about a great tool for comparison testing of hardware & relational database products called HammerDB. This is an open-source solution that uses the TPC-C (OLTP-style queries) and TPC-H (OLAP-style queries) workloads. The UI is a bit rough, but the tool is powerful and is a lot easier than trying to figure out how to replicate your own workload in a non-production environment.

In the News

Mala shared an article on the 50th anniversary of SQL as a language. And I tossed in an article concerning software liability in the EU.