[Mark Brown (markjbrown)]

Summary

Cumulative customer-visible improvements since public v0.17.1 Preview:

• Distinguish structural over-partitioning from partition-merge eligibility. Continuous backup (PITR) blocks merge and cannot be reverted to periodic backup on the existing account; no recommendation is made to disable PITR. Unknown or migrating backup state is unverified and withholds merge instructions. Periodic backup still requires the platform eligibility checker and SDK/connector checks.
• Record optional full-fidelity change-feed enablement only when authoritative metadata supplies it. Missing SDK/API metadata leaves enablement unknown, and enablement does not establish active usage. Active consumers are not discovered, and Fabric Mirroring is not assessed.
• Add DX-024 indexing cost risk for dedicated, shared-throughput, and serverless NoSQL containers without requiring Log Analytics. Index/data ratios above 0.3 are Low and above 1.0 are Medium; existing indexing exclusions remain evidence rather than suppressing findings.
• Base DX-002/DX-007 structural fan-out severity on physical partition count and query rate, with a 0.1 query/second floor instead of a query-cost gate. Use unrounded measurements for shard-key misalignment boundary decisions.
• Preserve DX-017's urgent High finding when a physical partition is already at or above 50 GiB, and avoid counting identical request logs exported to multiple workspaces as additional activity.
• Select the newest non-draft release, including Previews, for automatic installation; bind downloads to its tag and verify checksums. GitHub Actions remain pinned to full commit SHAs.

Preview status and validation

This remains v0.17.12 Preview. Fresh all-detector live acceptance and signed-in manual Portal-link verification remain deferred under the existing Preview policy. Offline export validation and reproducibility passed; these do not prove live detector correctness. Online GitHub checks are required before merge.

Backup eligibility is not complete merge eligibility. No hosted service, automatic remediation, new Azure permissions, feature-disabling recommendations, or PyPI publication is introduced.