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Category: Cloud

Copy Job in Fabric Data Factory Pipelines now GA

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

Jianlei Shen makes an announcement:

Copy Job Activity allows you to run Copy jobs as native activities inside Data Factory pipelines.

Copy jobs are created and managed independently in Data Factory for quick data movement between supported sources and destinations. With Copy job Activity, that same fast, lightweight experience is now embedded within pipelines, making it easier to automate, schedule, and chain Copy jobs as part of broader data workflows.

Read on for an overview of what’s in the activity and a few links on how to get started with it.

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SQL Database in Fabric now GA

Published 2025-11-19 by Kevin Feasel

Anna Hoffman and Idris Motiwala make an announcement:

SQL is everywhere and Microsoft is innovating to deliver a unified experience across on-premises, cloud, and SaaS. One SQL unifies your data estate, bringing platform consistency, performance at scale, advanced security, and AI-ready tools together in one seamless experience, and SQL database in Fabric is no exception to that. At Microsoft Ignite, we’re thrilled to announce SQL database in Microsoft Fabric is officially Generally Available!

This is definitely a fluffy post, though Anna does have some linked videos that go into more detail.

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Cutting Costs of Azure Self-Hosted Integration Runtimes

Published 2025-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword saves some quid:

If you have a Self-Hosted Integration Runtime (SHIR, or IR for short here) on an Azure Virtual Machine (VM), there’s a cost to keep it online. When used intermittently – for example during batch processes – this is inefficient for costs as you’re paying for the compute you don’t need. One way to alleviate this is by controlling uptime of the environment manually, only bringing it online for as long as needed.

Read on to see how to do this.

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Optimized Locking and Change Event Streaming in SQL Server 2025

Published 2025-11-12 by Kevin Feasel

Deb Melkin is looking forward to a pair of features:

When I look at this release, I feel like I’ve been more tuned into what’s coming out than any other. I’m still not sure how that happened. But I think overall it’s a good thing because there really is a lot being packed into this release. If you’re just trying to figure out now, you’re already behind.

There are really 2 features that I’m really excited about:

Read on to learn more about both of them.

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Microsoft Fabric Warehouse Snapshots now GA

Published 2025-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Twinkle Cyril makes an announcement:

Managing data consistency during ETL has always been a challenge for our customers. Dashboards break, KPIs fluctuate, and compliance audits become painful when reporting hits ‘half-loaded’ data. With Warehouse Snapshots, Microsoft Fabric solves this by giving you a stable, read-only view of your warehouse at a specific point in time and now, this capability is Generally Available! Think of this as a true time travel database, an industry-first capability that sets us apart.

I wonder how much they differ from the database snapshots available in SQL Server.

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An Overview of Azure Managed Cassandra’s Architecture

Published 2025-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Abel describes an architecture:

I’ve been learning about Azure Managed Cassandra recently, and it’s very different from the usual relational SQL Server database. The documentation and tutorials can seem confusing at first, but once I broke things down it was easier to understand basic concepts.

Read on for a warning about different flavors of Cassandra, as well as how Microsoft has organized things in their implementation of Cassandra.

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Business Continuity Options in Azure

Published 2025-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Aleksey Vitsko enumerates available options:

You may be familiar with high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) features that are available in SQL Server and have experience configuring and managing them. But you have ever heard of or tried Azure high availability or Azure disaster recovery features. How can I learn more about what Azure brings in terms of HA and DR for Azure SQL offerings – including SQL VMs?

Read on for a variety of options depending upon whether you’re using SQL Server on a VM, Azure SQL Database, or Azure SQL Managed Instance.

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Azure Tenants and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Cutler begins a new series on Microsoft Fabric architecture:

Our Fabric Architecture journey starts with Azure Tenants (the kick-off blog in this series is here with a few jumping-off links to get started with thinking about Fabric Architecture). If you’re ready to spent time sketching out your Fabric Capacity planning, workspace strategy, domain topology, lakehouse/warehouse creation, data loading processes…you might want to stop for a minute and think about tenants. The question I’d like you to consider is “What do I need to know when working with a single or a multi-tenancy approach?” Let’s unpack this question because while it might sound like a simple list, it actually shapes your governance, scalability, and Fabric operational model. If you’re a seasoned Azure Architect veteran then you already know how to decide between single and multi-tenant cloud rollouts (also, please comment if you have anything to add please), if you work with Fabric/Data and don’t really dive into Azure architecture on a daily basis then please stick around. Hopefully this blog gets you thinking about single/multi-tenant architectures and the benefits/costs.

Read on for a dive into what tenants are, the benefits of single- versus multi-tenancy, and how it all ties into Fabric.

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Calling Logic Apps via Data Factory Pipelines

Published 2025-11-05 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword flips the script:

Last week we looked at calling a Data Factory Pipeline from a Logic App. This week I thought we’d balance it out by taking a look at calling a Logic App from an Azure Data Factory (ADF) Pipeline.

When building the Logic App last week we had to create our own polling mechanism to check for completion of the pipeline. The process is much simpler in the opposite direction. I specifically want to highlight two approaches, and save some pennies whilst we’re at it.

I am all about saving pennies, so be sure to check out that section as well.

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Executing Data Factory Pipelines from Logic Apps

Published 2025-10-29 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Brownsword automates a workflow:

When building Azure Logic Apps we can use the Azure Data Factory connector to start a pipeline. However that action simply triggers a pipeline and doesn’t wait for it to finish. If your downstream logic depends on the output – for example to collect a file – this can cause issues.

In this post I’ll demonstrate how to control the Logic App flow to wait for the pipeline to complete before proceeding.

Read on to see how, as well as some additional ideas of how to improve the pattern.

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