A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Eugene Meidinger busts out the calculator:
If you’ve dealt with Power BI licensing before, Fabric licensing makes sense as an extension of that model plus some new parts around CUs, bursting and smoothing. But what if you are brand new to Fabric, Power BI, and possibly even Office 365?
Read on for the basic requirements, as well as building from there.
Comments closedChris Webb builds a Rube Goldberg device:
Following on from my last post where I showed how to send data from Power Automate to a Fabric Eventstream, in this post I’m going to show how to use it to solve one of my favourite problems: refreshing a Power BI semantic model that uses an Excel workbook stored in OneDrive as a source when that Excel workbook is modified.
Now before I go on I want to be clear that I know this is a ridiculously over-engineered and expensive (in terms of CUs) solution, and that you can do almost the same thing just using Power Automate or in several other different ways – see my colleague Mark Pryce-Maher’s recent videos on using Fabric Open Mirroring with Excel for example. I’m doing this to teach myself Fabric Eventstreams and Activator and see what’s possible with them. Please excuse any mistakes or bad practices.
Click through for the process.
Comments closedKoen Verbeeck has an existing Azure Data Factory:
We recently started using Microsoft Fabric for our cloud data platform. However, we already have quite an estate of Azure data services running in our company, including a huge number of Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines. It seems cumbersome to migrate all those pipelines to Microsoft Fabric, especially because some features are not supported yet and ADF is the mature choice at the moment. We like the concept of Microsoft Fabric’s centralization, where everything is managed in one platform. Is there an option to manage ADF in Fabric?
Read on for the answer, but make sure to check out its limitations as well.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar tries out the Polars library:
The much-anticipated Python notebook in Fabric is finally available and the Fabric users have already developed cool libraries and blogged about the usefulness of these notebooks. Duckdb is everyone’s favorite, but I am a Python guy so here is quick overview of how you can use Polars in the Python notebook.
Polars is an open-source library that uses a Rust engine and supports multi-threaded execution. This means it’s significantly faster than pandas and, in some cases, even faster than Spark. It can efficiently use the limited resources available in Python notebooks (2 cores, 16GB RAM). Polars v1.6 is installed in the default Python notebook environment. So, let’s see how to perform some common operations.
Read on to see how you can load and write out files via Polars.
Comments closedJens Vestergaard shares some info about sharing some info:
At #MSIgnite Microsoft announced a new feature in Fabric that allows people from one organization to share data with people from another organization. You might ask yourself why is this even news, and rightly so. Up until last week, professionals have had to use tools like (S)FTP clients like FileZilla, Azure Storage Explorer, WeTransfer or similar products in order to share data. Some of these tools are in fact hard to use and/or understand for a great number of business users – they are familiar with Windows and the Office suite and not much more. This is all to be expected, as business users in general should focus on business stuff rather than IT stuff.
Read on to see how this has changed, and an update to what I consider one of the coolest products to come out of Microsoft Fabric.
Comments closedFabric’s Real-Time Intelligence features are, for me, the most interesting things to learn about in the platform. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in them – far from it – but they are quite easy to use and they open up some interesting possibilities for low-code/no-code people like me. The other day I was wondering if it was possible to send events and data from Power Automate to Fabric using Eventstreams and it turns out it is quite easy to do.
Read on to see just how easy it is. And there’s a good question from a reader about using other languages, such as Powershell. Turns out the answer is yes.
Comments closedMeagan Longoria performs a search:
Have you ever wondered where a certain field is used in a report? Or maybe you need an easy way to find broken field references in a report? Certain 3rd-party tools such as Measure Killer and Power BI Helper (not updated recently) have helped us with this task in the past. But now we can perform this task with a notebook in Fabric!
This is made possible by the Semantic Link Labs Python library. Please note that PBIR format is still in preview at the time of publishing this blog post, so use it at your own risk. Also, this works only on reports published to the Power BI service. Since this notebook is not making any changes to the report, I feel it’s pretty safe to run, but do remember that it uses CUs on your Fabric capacity while you run it.
Read on to see how it works.
Comments closedJon Voge gives us a use case for Fabric SQL Databases:
Until recently, Fabric has allowed us to choose between Lakehouses and Warehouses as a backend. For write-back use cases, neither are ideal.
- The SQL Endpoint of Lakehouses are Read-Only, making writes from Power Apps impossible.
- While the SQL Endpoint of Warehouses are write-enabled, they do not support enforced Primary Keys, which are a hard requirement for Power Apps to be able to write directly to a data source.
Jon briefly describes two mechanisms people used and then how you can do this more effectively with a Fabric SQL Database. Based on the article, it seems that you could probably still do the same with an Azure SQL Database, though I suppose handling the managed identity could be an issue.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar parses the logs:
Workspace Monitoring was one of my favorite announcements at MS Ignite ‘24 this week. It logs events from Fabric items such as Semantic Models, Eventhouse, GraphQL to a KQL database that’s automatically provisioned and managed in that workspace. Currently it’s limited to these three items but hopefully other (especially spark and pipelines) will be added soon. Read the announcement by Varun Jain (PM, Microsoft) on this for details.
Click through for some thoughts from Sandeep, as well as a variety of useful queries.
Comments closedLog Analytics and Workspace Monitoring in Fabric logs all the activities of datasets in a workspace. These logs contain dataset, report, visual IDs which the user has to decipher to get the full picture. Dataset, report ids are straightforward but it’s not easy to get visual IDs programmatically. Chris Webb already has a blog on couple of different ways to get the visual IDs. That blog was published in 2022 and in the Fabric world we now have a couple of more options.
Read on for two additional methods you can use.
Comments closed