Teo Lachev has started a new series. We begin with warehouse ETL:
As inspired by Amir Netz‘s encouragement to partners to test the Fabric F2 capacity performance, I got on a quest to test what it would do to ETL loads for Fabric Warehouse. I must admit that I was skeptical that a quarter of a core would take a warehouse off the ground, but as usual, life proved me wrong and “wrong” is a big understatement of what happened.
After provisioning a Fabric F2 capacity and a warehouse, I settled on the Retail Data Model for World Wide Importers sample star schema dataset consisting of five dimension tables and one fact table. In terms of performance, I was mostly interested in how long it would take for the ADF copy activity to insert all the data (50 million rows) in the fact table. Granted, it’s a limited test but enough to rule out the technology for real-life projects. Then, I compared the performance against Azure SQL Database Serverless running on up to 2 cores and provisioned by the free trial offer that Microsoft has on Azure. To exclude impact on data transfer between regions, both technologies were provisioned on East US 2 data region, which is the region where my Power BI tenant is hosted on.
Then we have report load time:
What a better way to spend a lazy holiday afternoon than to do more Fabric performance testing? In my previous post, I shared my results from a single-threaded ETL load test to gauge the F2 ingest performance and F2 did pretty well (or at least outperformed Azure SQL DB). Will F2 hold as parallelism increases? Throughput testing is especially important for report loads because parallel tasks can run within a report, such as visuals executing DAX queries in parallel, and across reports, such as when concurrent report requests overlap.
I’m legitimately surprised at the results. I expected F2 to be barely sufficient for testing purposes. Read both posts to see how it performs and some caveats around performance.