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Category: Microsoft Fabric

An Overview of the Current State of Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew pulls no punches:

Despite playing with different parts of the Fabric ecosystem for a long time. Nothing ever prepares you for the challenges and “quirks” faced when building a solution for real. In this post I’ll call out some of the pain points we’ve faced and features of the product still requiring improvement. Excluding some of the obvious gaps in the product like security, that we know to be coming.

Read on for Paul’s analysis on what Fabric is currently missing, but as you do read it, keep in mind that this is still in public preview and even after it goes GA, Microsoft will continue development on Fabric.

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Loading Data from Sharepoint Lists into Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-10-31 by Kevin Feasel

Stepan Resl loads some data:

In a time of Fabric, it’s worth pointing out our three options for data ingestion.

  • Data Pipelines with Copy Activity
  • Dataflows Gen 2
  • Notebooks

We must compare them to understand ​​what each can offer us from different perspectives. To be able to compare them thoroughly, there are some guardrails that we need to set so that everything goes the same way.

My biggest takeaway from this is, don’t load important business data into Sharepoint Lists to begin with.

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Row- and Column-Level Security in Microsoft Fabric Warehouses

Published 2023-10-30 by Kevin Feasel

Maheswaran Arunachalam gives us an update on data security in Microsoft Fabric:

Row-Level Security (RLS) and Column-Level Security (CLS) are methods that simplify the design and coding of security in applications by imposing restrictions on data access. CLS allows for specific users to access only certain columns of a table relevant to their department, protecting sensitive data. RLS, on the other hand, restricts users to accessing only data rows pertinent to their role or department. Both methods locate the access restriction logic in the database tier, applying the restrictions every time data access is attempted from any tier, making the security system more reliable and robust.

Click through for the process. This is pretty much the same as any SQL Server-based system.

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Analyzing Dependencies in Microsoft Fabric Measures

Published 2023-10-27 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar has an interesting library for us:

In my previous blog post, I introduced Semantic-Link, discussing its use cases and explained how it enables us to create solutions that were either not possible or not easily achievable before. In this blog post, I would like to present another powerful use case that, although possible in the past, could not be created and used seamlessly in Power BI. Allow me to introduce the MeasureMaze Python library, which helps uncover insights from a complex maze of dependencies in a Power BI semantic model using Semantic-Link and the power of network analysis.

Sandeep dives into the approach and what you get out of this library. It’s very interesting.

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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.

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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.

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(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.

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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.

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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.

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