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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Enterprise Agreements and Transitioning from Power BI P SKUs to Fabric F SKUs

Published 2024-04-22 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld talks licensing:

To facilitate a smooth transition from Power BI to Fabric (new capabilities), Microsoft ensured customers could access these new Fabric workloads as well as Copilot for Power BI on their existing Power BI Premium capacity P SKUs.

However, with the introduction of Azure-billed pay-as-you-go and annual reservation F SKUs for Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft recently announced the eventual retirement of the Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs that needs to consider an organization’s Enterprise Agreement (EA) timing.

Read on to learn more, especially if you currently have a Power BI Premium P1 (or higher) SKU.

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Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model via Fabric Pipelines

Published 2024-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld builds a pipeline:

Recently, Microsoft released a new activity type to trigger Power BI Semantic Model refreshes. A great step forward to have a native pipeline activity and no longer need to setup complex steps with APIs and authentication manually. Or is there still a case?

In this blog I will elaborate on what this new Pipeline activity exactly is, various scenarios in which it can be applied and finally some edge cases and shortcomings.

Click through to see how it works.

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Mirroring Snowflake to Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad hogs the photocopier:

Microsoft Fabric offers an end-to-end SaaS analytics solution; however, the world is using all kinds of data sources in its implementation. Mirroring is a new functionality in Fabric that allows customers to keep their data wherever they are, but then they can use Fabric analytics solutions with the same speed and performance as if their data were in Fabric. Best of all, this won’t cost extra. If you wonder what it is and how it works, read this article.

Click through for the video and article.

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A Scaffolding Design Pattern for Microsoft Fabric Pipelines

Published 2024-04-15 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard shares some thoughts on design:

When assigned a project, it’s tempting – and dangerous – to Just Start Coding. If you suffer from the urge to develop first and design later, you are not alone (there’s at least one other developer like you and he’s typing this post). Do yourself a favor and…

Read on for more information on Andy’s design-first mentality and a sample of how you might lay out that initial design.

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Mirroring Azure SQL DB into Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-04-12 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes 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.

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Trying out Microsoft Fabric Mirroring of Cosmos DB

Published 2024-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant gives it the ol’ college try:

In this post I cover some initial testing of Mirroring Azure Cosmos DB Databases in Microsoft Fabric that I performed.

I wanted to do this post for various reasons. Including the fact that it was announced during the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference that Mirroring is now in Public Preview.

Which means that you can now mirror data from Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos DB and Snowflake into your own Microsoft Fabric tenant. Even trial tenants.

Kevin takes us through the process and gives it a try, sharing with us the results of some testing, including a test insertion of 100 million rows.

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Microsoft Fabric Workspace Soft Deletion and Retention

Published 2024-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld fills us in on the details:

This morning, I was looking for a specific tenant setting in the Fabric admin portal. While scrolling through a few of the tenant settings, I came across a specific one, which I like to elaborate on a bit more in detail, given I recently also had some questions around this topic from customers.

What happens if you delete a Fabric workspace? Is there a way to recover? How and for how long? Well, we now have a tenant setting to control this!

Click through for the details.

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Comparing Direct Lake and Import Mode in Power BI

Published 2024-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Marco 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.

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Migrating Power BI Semantic Models to Direct Lake

Published 2024-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola 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.

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Thoughts on Copilot in Fabric

Published 2024-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld notes a pattern:

Lately it’s copilot before and after in all Microsoft communications and announcements. Also, during the Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas where I was last week, it was hard to keep count of the number of times copilot was mentioned. Next to Microsoft communications, everyday conversations with customers and colleagues include copilots everywhere too. Which is fine, as long as we manage to keep things in perspective.

In this blog I will further elaborate on my experiences with copilot, where I experienced it as a useful addition to my day-to-day job and also where we should be careful. And no, this is not a rant on copilot, but just sharing my vision and everyday experience when talking about copilot to my customers.

I appreciate Marc’s grounding here. There’s a huge amount of hype around the various copilots, but after the initial demos, there’s a good bit less utility than meets the eye at present.

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