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Category: KQL

Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres takes a peek at a service with a new name:

When everyone starts to announce Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric as something new, I need to double check what’s happening: Am I crazy or is everyone else? Wasn’t this already there?

Finally, I realize that Real-Time Intelligence is a new name for Real-Time Analytics, and they are doing this so fast we don’t even have time to notice the difference.

What’s Real-Time Intelligence and what’s the difference from Real-Time Analytics?

Read on for those answers.

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Updating Records in a Kusto Database

Published 2024-06-18 by Kevin Feasel

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon has an announcement:

Kusto databases, either in Fabric (KQL Database) or in Azure (Azure Data Explorer), are optimized for append ingestion.

In recent years, we’ve introduced the .delete command, allowing you to selectively delete records.

In February, we introduced the .update command in public preview.  This command allows you to update records by deleting existing records and appending new ones in a single transaction.

Today, the .update is Generally Available (GA)!

Click through for more details, including a link to the documentation, where you can see several examples of the syntax.

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Updating Records in a Kusto Database

Published 2024-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon shows off a feature now in public preview:

Kusto databases, either in Azure Data Explorer or in Fabric KQL Database, are optimize for append ingestion.

In recent years, we’ve introduce the .delete command allowing you to selectively delete records.

Today we are introducing the .update command.  This command allows you to update records by deleting existing records and appending new ones in a single transaction.

This command comes with two syntaxes, a simplified syntax covering most scenarios efficiently and an expanded syntax giving you the maximum of control.

Read on for more information and a pair of examples of how updating works.

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Using KQL in Azure SQL DB Audits

Published 2023-12-27 by Kevin Feasel

Josephine Bush tracks what’s happening on that Azure SQL Database:

According to Microsoft, “Kusto Query Language (KQL) is a powerful tool to explore your data and discover patterns, identify anomalies and outliers, create statistical modeling, and more. The query uses schema entities that are organized in a hierarchy similar to SQLs: databases, tables, and columns.”

Note: KQL is case-sensitive for everything. Also, remember to refrain from querying everything just like you wouldn’t with SQL — don’t do the equivalent of SELECT * from gianttable.

Microsoft also has a lot of documentation with best practices and a quick reference guide to the Kusto commands. This blog post covers the ones I use the most.

Read on for a primer on the language, specifically some of the things you can do when reading Azure SQL Database audit information.

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Exposing KQL Data in OneLake

Published 2023-11-28 by Kevin Feasel

Brian Bønk gets in on the Microsoft Fabric fun:

Microsoft has released the final piece of the current puzzle around the OneLake as a one-stop-shopping service for dat in Fabric. Until now we had only access to the KQL data in the KQL database.

With this addition, we can now finally say that OneLake is the one place for your data in Fabric.

Read on to see how you can make data in an existing KQL database usable in OneLake.

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Schema Validation with Kusto Databases

Published 2023-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

Vincent-Philippe Lauzon tests the schema:

Kusto allows you to very quickly get productive.  You can setup an ingestion pipeline in minutes that will ingest Terabytes (TBs) of data per day.

Like any piece of code, your database schema is as good as the intent you convey when you wrote it.  But over time, the intent diffuses and different priorities, authors and just plain miscommunication can diminish the quality of your code.

Read on to see what it does and the benefits it provides.

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Many-to-Many Power BI Relationships and Table Refreshes

Published 2023-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Dany Hoter gives us a reason to minimize use of many-to-many relationships in Power BI:

I must admit that in the last two years I’ve told many Power BI/Kusto customers not to worry about relationships that are created as M:M.

I was pretty sure that with Direct Query, such relationships are fine,

Indeed, the generated queries looked fine and performed as expected.

I recently became aware that the number of queries generated for some visuals e.g. Matrix and tables can be affected by the type of relationships between the participating tables.

Read on for a description of why you shouldn’t load your Power BI semantic models with many-to-many relationships, especially once Kusto is involved.

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ApplicationContext Updates for Power BI

Published 2023-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shares an update with us:

If you’re a fan of using Log Analytics for monitoring Power BI activity, then you may have noticed there’s some new data in the ApplicationContext column of the PowerBIDatasetsWorkspace table. Up until recently the ApplicationContext column only contained IDs that identify the report and the visual that generated a DAX query (something I blogged about here); it now contains additional information on the type of Power BI report that generated the query and an ID for the user session.

This is quite useful for seeing not just that people are using your Power BI services, but also who and what they are using to consume the information. Though do beware Chris’s warning about consumption method before you get too excited.

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(Near)-Real-Time Analysis with Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-19 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad continues a series on Microsoft Fabric:

Microsoft Fabric offers a workload for real-time solutions. Real-time Analytics can be used for streaming data, such as the data coming from IoT devices. It can be used not only to ingest the data but also to analyze it and use it for other Fabric workloads, such as data science. In this article and video, you will learn what is Real-Time Analytics in Microsoft Fabric and how it works.

Read on for a detailed demo.

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Visualizing Kusto Graphs with Plotly and Python

Published 2023-10-05 by Kevin Feasel

Henning Rauch creates some plots:

Graphs are a powerful way to model and analyse complex relationships between entities, such as cybersecurity incidents, network traffic, social networks, and more. Kusto, the query and analytics engine of Azure Data Explorer, Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Analytics and many more recently introduced a new feature that enables users to contextualize their data using graphs. In this blog post, we will show you how to use graph semantics to create and explore graph data in Kusto, and how to visualize it using Plotly, a popular library for interactive data visualization in Python.

Graph semantics are a set of operators that allow users to work with graph data in Kusto, without the need to use a separate graph database or framework.

Click through for the KQL you’ll need, as well as how to display that in Plotly.

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