A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Koen Verbeeck lets us into the lakehouse:
We’re doing a proof-of-concept with Microsoft Fabric, building our data model in a lakehouse. We’d like to give people access to the data inside it so they can build their own reports with whatever tool they want. Is there an easy way to share access to a lakehouse (preferably not by giving access to the entire workspace)?
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar sets up a default lakehouse:
I wrote a blog post a while ago on mounting a lakehouse (or generally speaking a storage location) to all nodes in a Fabric spark notebook. This allows you to use the File API file path from the mounted lakehouse.
Mounting a lakehouse using
mssparkutils.fs.mount()doesn’t define the default lakehouse of a notebook. To do so, you can use the configure magic as below:
Read on for that command, as well as some notes around using it.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck helps us choose:
This doesn’t mean no code has to be written. On the contrary, in this article we’re going to focus on two services of Fabric: the lakehouse and the warehouse. The first one is part of the Data Engineering experience in Fabric, while the latter is part of the Data Warehousing experience. Both require code to be written to create any sort of artefact. In the warehouse we can use T-SQL to create tables, load data into them and do any kind of transformation. In the lakehouse, we use notebooks to work with data, typically in languages such as PySpark or Spark SQL.
Read on for the comparison. I tend to go more for the lakehouse experience rather than warehouse, but Koen provides a lot of the info you’d need in order to make the right decision for yourself.
Comments closedReitse Eskens busts out the stopwatch:
I just can’t seem to stop doing this, checking the limits of Microsoft Fabric. In this instalment I’ll try and find some limits on the data warehouse experience and compare them with the Lakehouse experience. The data warehouse is a bit different compared to the Lakehouse, so I’ll be digging into that one first. Then I’m going to load data into the warehouse with a copy data pipeline followed by some big queries to test performance. The Fabric Capacity App will be used to check out the capacity necessary (or used for that matter).
As usual, I’m using the F2 capacity as it’s the one that should break the easiest. It’s also the cheapest one to run tests against and, as the capacity calculation isn’t dependent on the SKU (Stock Keeping Unit), you can easily translate to find out which capacity SKU will fit the workload. Remember that your workload will differ from the one shown in this blog. These tests are a comparison between the different offerings, something you could do for yourself. These blogs are a bit of a happy place as every option will get a good chance. In your work, your skills (and those of your co-workers) will be a major driver towards an option. Even if this offers the chance to learn something new!
Reitse focuses on ingesting and transforming data and the results were quite interesting.
Comments closedJosephine Bush continues a series on modern data warehousing:
In today’s data-driven world, having the right tools to manage and process large datasets is crucial. That’s where Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and Azure Data Factory (ADF) come in handy, making it easier than ever to store and transform your data. In this post, I’ll show you how to set up ADLS to store your Parquet files and configure ADF to manage your data flows efficiently.
Read on for an overview of both technologies.
Comments closedReza Rad has a new post and video combo:
Please don’t get lost in the terminology pit regarding analytics. You have probably heard of Lake Structure, Data Lake, Lakehouse, Delta Tables, and Delta Lake. They all sound the same! Of course, I am not here to talk about all of them; I am here to explain what Delta Lake is.
Delta Lake is an open-source standard for Apache Spark workloads (and a few others). It is not specific to Microsoft; other vendors are using it, too. This open-source standard format stores table data in a way that can be beneficial for many purposes.
In other words, when you create a table in a Lakehouse in Fabric, the underlying structure of files and folders for that table is stored in a structure (or we can call it format) called Delta Lake.
Read on to learn more about this open standard and how it all fits together with Microsoft Fabric.
Comments closedDennes Torres holds up a mirror:
You need to read data from production to build a single source of truth. If you create pipelines reading directly from production, you will create additional load over the production environment. The mirror allows you to do much of the production reporting from the mirror, leaving the production environment to serve other users. Keep in mind, production report, but not analytics report.
Mirroring a production database to Fabric is one method to ensure the load over production will be as low as possible and the data will be transferred fabric to complete the transformations from this point.
Only this? What about avoiding pipeline creation? Not really, you still need to create pipelines, as I will explain ahead.
Click through for the demo and explanation. This is an important thing for people to note: mirroring doesn’t eliminate ELT. You still have the data lake process to work through, as your transactional system does not and should not look like your reporting system.
Comments closedMarco Russo compares and contrasts:
What is the right choice between Direct Lake and Import mode in Power BI?
At SQLBI, we do not publish content until we have had enough time to experiment with and collect data about new features. We usually don’t break the news unless we have enough time to test a feature in preview and consider the released service solid enough. This did not happen with Direct Lake, and we have not published any Direct Lake content yet, but it seemed not urgent for reasons we will see soon. However, the feedback collected from many attendees of SqlBits 2024 and the first Microsoft Fabric Conference raised the alarm: too many people have an incorrect perception of Direct Lake, which should be addressed as soon as possible to avoid architectural mistakes and unnecessary additional implementation costs.
Click through for the tl;dr version, followed by the explanations.
Comments closedNikola Ilic performs a migration:
Here is my scenario: there is an existing Power BI semantic model in import mode (in reality, there are many of them, but for the sake of keeping things simple for this blog post, let’s pretend that there is only one semantic model to be migrated).
Click through to see what the current state of the semantic model looks like, as well as the way to migrate. It’s not trivial, but Nikola does take us through it step by step.
Comments closedPaul Turley shares some advice:
Since the introduction of Power Pivot for Excel, SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular, Azure Analysis Services and Power BI; the native mode for storing data in a semantic data model (previously called a “dataset” in Power BI) has been a proprietary file structure consisting of binary and XML files. These file structures were established in the early days of multidimensional SSAS back in 2000 and 2005. When an Import mode model is published to the Power BI service, deployed to an SSAS server or when Power BI Desktop is running, data for the model is loaded into memory where it remains as long as the service is running. When users interact with a report or when DAX queries are run against the model, results are retrieved very quickly from the data residing in memory. There are some exceptions for very large models or when many models in the service don’t all fit into memory at the same time, the service will page some or all of the model in and out of memory to make sure that the most-often used model pages remain in memory for the next user request. But, for argument’s sake, the entire semantic model sits in memory, waiting for the next report or user request.
Rather than the proprietary SSAS file structure, Direct Lake models use the native Delta-parquet files that store structured data tables for a Fabric lakehouse or warehouse in One Lake. And rather than making a copy of the data in memory, the semantic model is a metadata structure that shares the same Delta-parquet file storage. As soon as a report runs against a model, all of the model data is paged into memory which then behaves a lot like an Import mode model. This means than while the model remains in memory, performance should about the same as Import, with a few exceptions.
Read on to see what the capabilities of Direct Lake mode are today, as well as a few design considerations for your Microsoft Fabric architecture.
Comments closed