Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric’s Reflex as Watchdog

Published 2023-10-23 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Martens brings home a junkyard dog:

Reflex is many things next to one of the workloads of Microsoft Fabric. Before I delve into these things in more detail in later articles (yes, maybe this is the birth of another series of articles), I want to say this: Reflex is cool. It was never that simple to watch your data in your Power BI datasets (and this is only one of the capabilities of Reflex).

Because I need images whenever I try to understand things, I start with a simple image of Reflex: I consider Reflex a watchdog! Reflex is watching something and alarms me or someone else when something happens – a defined condition is met.

Read on for an example of how this works using a real dataset.

Comments closed

Data Activator in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Johnny Winter takes a look at Data Activator:

It activates data right? Err… not sure that’s even a thing. The one liner I’d give it, is that it acts ON your data.

The concept is that in this day and age, taking action on the insights in your data is still a very manual effort. So why not automate the monitoring of that data and have Data Activator take that action for you? In my mind it’s Microsoft’s attempt to bring Robotic Process Automation (RPA) closer to to your data.

So how does it work and what actions can you take?

That’s where you’ll have to read the whole thing—this post is just a trailer, after all.

Comments closed

(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.

Comments closed

Cloning Tables in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck is interested:

A while ago I had a little blog post series about cool stuff in Snowflake. I’m starting up a similar series, but this time for Microsoft Fabric. I’m not going to cover the basic of Fabric, hundreds of bloggers have already done that. I’m going to cover little bits & pieces that I find interesting, that are similar to Snowflake features or something that is an improvement over the “regular” SQL Server.

To kick off this series, I’m going to start with a feature that also exists in Snowflake: zero-copy cloning. The idea is that you create a copy of a table, but instead of actually copying the data, pointers are created behind the scenes that just point to the original data. This means creating a clone is a metadata-only operation and is thus very fast. If you make updates against your clone, they will be stored separately, so in all purposes it seems you created a brand new table. Except you didn’t.

Read on to see how this works and what its current limitations are compared to Snowflake.

Comments closed

Monitoring Power BI Gateways with Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-18 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Martens builds a solution:

No matter what, when the on-premises gateways are not working as expected, data will not refresh, and direct query queries will not succeed. For this reason, I consider it a good idea to track the well-being of these valuable resources. This article describes a solution built with Microsoft Fabric. It’s not necessary to use Fabric, and it’s also not necessary to build a solution on your own. If you want to track the well-being of your on-premises data gateways but do not want to build something, I recommend using the solution by Rui Romano you can find here: https://github.com/RuiRomano/pbigtwmonitor

I built this monitoring solution focusing on the well-being of the on-premises data gateway. I might extend this solution in the future, but for now, it’s about the availability of the on-premises data gateway and the data gateway connections. Availability and analysis will follow during the next weeks.

Click through for Tom’s solution.

Comments closed

Using Tableau with Power BI and Fabric

Published 2023-10-17 by Kevin Feasel

Kurt Buhler crosses the streams:

If you use Power BI, Fabric, or Excel, connecting to Power BI datasets is straightforward. However if you use other BI tools like Tableau, it’s not obvious how you can leverage a Power BI semantic model in your workflow. In this article, I’ll explain how to connect to and use a Power BI dataset from Tableau Desktop.

Read on to see how. Also check out the notes in drill-down sections, as there’s a lot of content in there.

Comments closed

Capacity Options in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-16 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens is at capacity:

Now I’m going to do something scary and try to explain some things. I tried to pay attention during the precon and had the pleasure of talking with Ljubica Vujovic Boskovic on the capacity usage. She, very patiently, helped me out where my mind completely lost all track. Her explanations were great, any errors are all mine and I will correct this blogpost if there are mistakes. If you want to know more, you can also read this blog by Chris Novak who digs a bit deeper into smoothing and bursting.

So let me give you a very quick and simple introduction into the capacity challenges we’re going to face.

Read on for an overview of how Microsoft Fabric capacity planning works and one concern with this style of “one capacity to rule them all.”

Comments closed

Microsoft Fabric and Dataverse

Published 2023-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Jose Mendes let us know what’s going on with Dataverse:

If like me, you’ve been keeping taps on what Microsoft has been up to on the Power Platform world, you would have noticed that there are two concepts that are regularly referenced in their architectures and generally associated to each other, Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen 2 and Common Data Model (CDM).

As Francesco referred in his blog, Microsoft ultimate vision is for the CDM to be the de facto standard data model, however, although there is a fair amount of resources talking about the capabilities and features, it can be a bit confusing to understand how you can actually store your data in the CDM format in ADLS and use it to run data analytics such as data warehousing, Power BI reporting and Machine Learning.

Read on for more of what’s happening on that front. I will admit that Dataverse tends to be way down on my list of priorities, but that’s because I’m a relational database snob.

Comments closed

Data Activator in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Toby Smith looks at the current state of Data Activator in Microsoft Fabric:

Fabric is the newest all-in-one analytics solution from Microsoft. It combines multiple components (some existing, some new) into a single integrated environment. One of these new components is Data Activator. As Data Activator is still in development, there is still more functionality to be added. This blog shares some of the current abilities and uses for Data Activator, along with ideas for how you can use it in your own business situations.

One of the biggest challenges with big data is understanding it. With tools like Power BI, we are now able to understand and analyse data better than ever before. But when do we act on it? Do we have to manually look at these reports daily just to check everything is going ok? This is where Data Activator comes in. Data activator is a no-code tool that automatically takes actions when certain conditions are met in the data. These actions can vary from alerts in Microsoft Teams, calling stored procedures, triggering other fabric items like a pipeline, or even retraining AI models.

This is a feature which has enormous potential for near-real-time alerting and automating workflows. But do read on to learn about some of the limitations currently in the product.

Comments closed