A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Patrick LeBlanc compiles a list:
We’ve got a lot of exciting updates this month. To name a few, NotebookUtils session management utilities, Enhancing COPY INTO operations with Granular Permissions in Data Warehouse, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Fabric REST APIs. Keep reading to hear about everything we have in store for you this month.
Click through for a lengthy update.
Leave a CommentDennes Torres takes us into the SQL Endpoint:
Recently I had a severe problem with SQL endpoints and I was required to build a quick workaround for this.
The problem brought to light details we don’t know about SQL Endpoints and the care we need to have.
Read on for notes on the SQL Endpoint cache and refresh operations, as well as a problem Dennes ran into along the way.
Leave a CommentKenneth Omorodion clears out some data:
More than before, organizations now aim for a well-defined approach to manage their data storage effectively. Some reasons for this include operational efficiency, cost management, regulatory compliance, and strategic decision-making. In this article, I will describe an approach on data retention management for Lakehouse files to manage data storage when the data exists as files in the Fabric Lakehouse.
There’s nothing built in but Kenneth makes it easy.
Leave a CommentSakshi Jain has an announcement:
Today, when an item owner leaves the company, their credentials expire, or they lose access, many Fabric items cease to function. For example, Lakehouses and their SQL Endpoints become inoperative, Pipelines fail to execute due to user access errors. In these situations, enabling another user to assume ownership would ensure business continuity.
We are pleased to announce that Fabric users with the right permissions can now take ownership of Fabric items.
This is a big deal. for the same reason that we don’t want individual users to own databases in SQL Server, having individual users own objects in Fabric lakehouses and endpoints was always a risky play. At least now, there’s a way to handle when that person leaves the company.
Leave a CommentAlthough this seems to be a simple thing to do, it is not a function that you can turn on or off. If you have a Dataflow that does the ETL and transforms and prepares the data, then to get the most up-to-date data into the report, you will need to refresh the Power BI semantic model after that, only upon successful refresh of both dataflow and semantic model is when you will have the up-to-date data into the report. Fortunately, in Fabric, this is a straightforward setup. In this article and video, I’ll explain how this is possible.
Click through for the video and the blog post. Granted, this feature is in preview, but using it is pretty straightforward.
Comments closedEugene Meidinger looks out for the smaller fish in the pond:
If you are a small (or even medium) business, you may be wondering “What is Fabric and do we even need it?” If you are primarily on Power BI Pro licenses today, you may not find a compelling reason to switch to Fabric today, but the value add should improve over time as new features are added on the Fabric side and some features get deprecated on the Power BI side.
Read on for plenty of advice, metaphors, and even a few warnings.
Comments closedKristyna Ferris needs to get a file:
Hey data friends! This blog is to discuss an edge case I’ve run into in Microsoft Fabric. I won’t go into all the context, but the goal was to have an Excel file accessible to Microsoft Fabric without OneDrive, SharePoint, nor an on-premises data gateway. We also didn’t want a csv because we wanted to have multiple tabs and structured tables with formulas which won’t save properly in csv files.
So how did we do it? OneLake!
Read on to learn how.
Comments closedEugene Meidinger calls out my favorite law of headlines:
If you know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, then you know the answer is no. But let’s get into it anyway.
Recently there was LinkedIn post that made a bunch of great and valid points but ended on an odd one.
Number one change would be removing Power BI from Fabric completely and doubling down on making it even easier for the average business user, as I have previously covered in some posts.
It’s hard for me to take this as a serious proposal instead of wishful thinking, but I think the author is being serious, so let’s treat it as such.
Read on for a bit of history and why Eugene thinks this is a very bad idea.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers sets up a new warehouse:
In this blog post I am going to show you how to create a Microsoft Fabric Warehouse, where the owner will be the Service Principal.
As mentioned in the blog post here are some of the advantages of having the Service Principal as the Warehouse Owner.
- Using a Service Principal to create the warehouse avoids issue where the person who created the warehouse leaves the organization and issues arise when the users account is deleted from Entra ID.
- You avoid the painful logging in with the user account to ensure the password remains updated.
- The organization now owns the warehouse and not an individual user.
I will show you how I created a Warehouse with the owner being a Service Principal this using a Microsoft Fabric Notebook
Click through for the notebook and additional commentary.
Comments closedIf you’re using deployment pipelines with Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI you’ll have found that when you deploy your model from one stage to another by default the model still points to the Lakehouse it was originally bound to. So, for example, if you deploy your model from your Development stage to your test stage, the model in the Test stage still points to the Lakehouse in the Development stage. The good news is that you can use the deployment rules feature of deployment pipelines to make sure the model in the Test stage points to a Lakehouse in the Test stage and in this post I’ll show you how.
Click through for the process.
Comments closed