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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Building a Power Query Template

Published 2024-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic looks at Power Query templates:

In this “ocean” of innovations, there are certain features that don’t get the deserved limelight – as they somehow go under the radar. Some of them, I really consider “hidden gems” – you might not use them in each and every solution, but in some scenarios, they can be of immense help.

A hidden gem that I’m introducing today is called Power Query Template. As of today, this feature is still in preview (the same as many others in Microsoft Fabric), but this doesn’t minimize its potential.

Read on to see why Nikola likes capability this so much.

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Time Travel in the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse

Published 2024-05-24 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad hops in the Delorean:

Data changes throughout time, especially in the world of BI and data warehousing systems; the data gets updated through ETL processes frequently. This means that the data you see in the warehouse today might differ from yesterday and the day before, and so on. Some parts of this data can be retrieved on a timely basis. You can, for example, query the sales amount from the sales table where the date has been the 2nd of April. That would give you the sales amount for the 2nd of April, even if you are querying it on the 23rd of May.

However, what if some of the sales transactions on the 2nd of April got updated? The sales amount you see would likely be the updated amount, but not the original amount. It is sometimes useful to be able to see what was that original amount, or in other words, travel in time and see what that value was.

Click through for a combination video and article. The syntax isn’t quite the same as with temporal tables in SQL Server, though it’s close enough to follow along if that’s your relevant experience.

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Open Questions on Fabric Administration

Published 2024-05-23 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew asks some great questions:

Microsoft Fabric is a big product with lots of different data handling capabilities. From a data engineering perspective creating and innovating with Fabric as a unified tool is a great experience, ultimately delivering data insights for the business and adding value, nice! However, as with all new developments, the creativity is the fun part. The governance and movement of code into production is less fun and can become the hard/ugly part if the change management, platform and governance aren’t mature enough.

Paul doesn’t have answers for us, though I do think many of these will eventually have answers most people find reasonable.

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Data Connections in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-05-22 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi takes us through the ins and outs of data connections:

Managing data connections in Microsoft Fabric can be challenging if you’re unsure where to start. This blog post and its detailed YouTube video will help you find, manage, and share the existing data connections, making your workflow more efficient and streamlined. A meaningful use case for this feature is to reuse the existing connections leading to more controlled connections to the data sources. More on this later in this blog.

Click through for the article and link to the video.

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Using F-SKU Power BI Capacity and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-05-16 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has a public service announcement:

Since the announcement in March that Power BI Premium P-SKUs are being retired and that customers will need to migrate to F-SKU capacities intead I have been asked the same question several times:

Why are you forcing me to migrate to Fabric???

This thread on Reddit is a great example. What I want to make clear in this post is the following:

Moving from P-SKU capacities to F-SKU capacities is not the same thing as enabling Fabric in your tenant

Click through for Chris’s explanation. Also check out the comments section for this one, as there are plenty of questions and responses in there.

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Authenticating to Fabric APIs via Sempy and Service Principals

Published 2024-05-15 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers links everything together:

I have been doing a fair amount of work lately with Fabric Notebooks.

I am always conscious to ensure that when I am authenticating using a Service Principal, I can make sure it is as secure as possible. To do this I have found that I can use the Azure Key Vault and Azure identity to successfully authenticate.

Read on for some of the advantages of using Azure Key Vault for this sort of credential management, as well as how to get it all working.

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A Review of the Microsoft Fabric Security Whitepaper

Published 2024-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant takes a look:

To manage expectations, Microsoft do openly state during the introduction that this white paper was created by combining multiple online security documents together.

Which probably explains some of the repetition. However, multiple references are better than none.

Plus, in the introduction they provide a link to the main Microsoft Fabric security page. Which is good starting point if you know what security feature you are looking for.

Anyway, the content itself is good. It provides some really good explanations and diagrams relating to certain areas. To help demystify certain aspects of security for some people.

Read on for Kevin’s first impressions of the whitepaper.

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Monitoring and Alerting on Fabric Capacity Metrics

Published 2024-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Ron L’Esteve wants to know what’s happening:

With Microsoft Fabric now generally available, organizations are interested in implementing this flagship Unified Data and AI Intelligence Platform for several reasons. Its native integration within the Azure stack provides seamless and secure access to widely used technologies for data integration, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. Microsoft Fabric’s storage and compute capacity is utilized by resources within this unified analytics platform, including storage repositories, such as data warehouses and data lakes, and compute capacity for Power BI, Pipelines, DW processing, and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) workloads.

Fabric capacity can be purchased on Azure with a pay-as-you-go model, and a 60-day free trial (64 CUs) is offered to test the platform. Organizations that have an existing Power BI Premium capacity can easily enable access to Fabric by using the Microsoft Fabric admin switch. Enabling Fabric in Power BI Premium as opposed to Azure Portal creates a problem: there is no easy way to monitor and set alerts on your Fabric capacity metrics in the Azure Portal.

Click through to learn how to install and use the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App.

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Adding the Current Date and Time to a PySpark Data Frame

Published 2024-05-09 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers wants to know what time it is:

How to add current DateTime to existing PySpark data frame in a Fabric Notebook

In the blog post below, I am going to describe how to add the current Date Time to your existing Spark data frame.

This is really useful when I am inserting data into a Fabric Lakehouse table, and I want to know when the data got inserted.

Read on for the answer.

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