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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Digging into the Microsoft Fabric Pricing Model

Published 2023-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic puts on the green eyeshades:

Microsoft Fabric is finally generally available! Yaaaay! Now, when the dust settles and the initial allure goes away, the most obvious question that one might ask is – how much will Fabric cost me?

Because, yes, it’s cool to have a unified analytics solution and all Fabric’s “weapons” at your disposal, but at the end of the day, looking at the wallet is what matters most:)

So, let’s try to break down all the available options, plus explain some of the concepts that may affect your Fabric workloads in terms of pricing. 

Read on to see what the major considerations are and how much you’ll shell out to use Fabric for real.

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Microsoft Fabric Now GA

Published 2023-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Ben Jarvis announces the news:

On the 15th November Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Fabric. Having seen Microsoft Fabric develop through our involvement in the private and public preview this is a really exciting announcement and all of us at Adatis are looking forward to seeing how it will fit into the solutions we are deploying to customers. 

It makes sense to announce going GA at Ignite, though I don’t think Fabric is ready for prime time yet. There are still so many gaps in the product, and even though many items are on the roadmap, I wonder if Fabric will get a bad reputation from going GA too early. My analogy is Cyberpunk 2077: when the game came out, it was a buggy mess. Most of the bugs have been fixed now, a couple of years later, but for many people, their everlasting impression of the game is how buggy it was.

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Searching for Tenant Settings in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser does a search:

Another nice feature update for administrators hit Microsoft Fabric – tenant settings got a search box!

Before the this new feature was added to the tenant settings page in October, you had one chance to search for the right tenant setting in the long list – the browser search feature. Just hit CTRL + F and search for i.e. Excel.

This is a quick quality of life improvement.

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Deactivating Pipeline Activities in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-11-14 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck shows us a convenient action you can perform in Microsoft Fabric pipelines:

A while ago I had a little blog post series about cool stuff in Snowflake. I’m doing a similar series now, 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 or related products.

In this blog post I’m highlighting the fact we can now deactivate activities in a pipeline

Read on to see how you can do this and what the implications of the action are.

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Data Warehouse Updates for Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres brings the news:

We have a specific statement to clone a table. But what exactly does it mean?

The Clone Table feature promises to create an image of the table on a specific point in time or with the current information. The documentation is not precise, because at some points it says it’s only a clone of the structure, but we can see the data on the table.

What’s the advantage of this over a simple SELECT INTO statement?

Read on for that comparison, as well as several other things recently added to Microsoft Fabric data warehouses.

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Microsoft Fabric Cost and Capacity

Published 2023-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi lays out the options:

Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS platform that allows users to get, create, share, and visualise data using a wide set of tools. It provides a unified solution for all our data and analytics workloads, from data ingestion and transformation to data engineering, data science, data warehouse, real-time analytics, and data visualisation. In a previous blog post, I explained the basics of the Microsoft Fabric data platform. In a separate blog post, I explained some Microsoft Fabric terminologies and personas where I explained what Tenant and Capacities are.

In this blog post, we will explore the different types of Fabric capacities, how they affect the performance and cost of our Fabric projects, and how you can control the capacity costs by pausing the capacity in Azure when it is not in use.

Click through for more information. The costs are in New Zealand Dollars, so translate as needed.

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Fun with Tables in the Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic dives into tables:

Probably the biggest confusion is: should I use a lakehouse or warehouse in Fabric? Or, what is the difference between Direct Lake and DirectQuery mode for Power BI reports?

And, while these two points mentioned above are of paramount importance to clarify, in this article I’ll focus on explaining another potential caveat, which is relevant when working with the lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric.

If only Nikola dove onto tables, I could make him an honorary Buffalo Bills fan.

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A PBIX Report for Microsoft Fabric’s Support Page

Published 2023-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers checks the status of Microsoft Fabric services:

What I wanted to show you is that I have created a Power BI report which shows the Microsoft Fabric Support page details.

I created one for Power BI which I receive daily, and it is great to get the subscription so that I am aware of any potential issues or changes affecting the Power BI Service.

I now have done the same thing for the Microsoft Fabric Support page; I have enabled the report subscription which I get daily.

Click through to see what it looks like and how you can get a copy of it for your own nefarious purposes.

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Formatting DAX Expressions with Python

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar makes the code a bit more readable:

There is an old Italian saying “If it’s not formatted, it is not DAX”

When you get the list of measures from SemPy, it’s not formatted and is hard to read and understand. Thankfully, the SQLBI team has made the DAX parser and the formatter available via an API. I wrote a quick function to return the formatted DAX expression of a measure. You can either pass a DAX expression or the FabricDataFrame returned by fabric.list_measures()

Click through for the process, including the Python code to do the work.

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