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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Contrasting Azure Synapse Analytics and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Warner Chaves explains the difference:

In the modern era of data-driven decision-making, businesses rely heavily on robust and efficient data platforms to process, analyze, and derive insights from their vast amounts of data. Since 2019, Azure Synapse Analytics has been Microsoft’s main contender in this space, offering powerful capabilities to handle complex data workloads.

Now, Microsoft has announced a new data platform called Microsoft Fabric, an evolution of the data platform built with a modified philosophy. It is a similar product but with enough differences to make them not interchangeable and so it’s very important to understand how they both compare and contrast if you’re planning a new data platform deployment. Microsoft wanted a product that was even simpler to deploy and operate and could function well outside of an Azure cloud environment as a full standalone Software As a Service offering.

In this blog post, we’ll compare Synapse Analytics and Fabric, highlighting their features, strengths, and considerations to help you make an informed decision for your organization’s data needs.

Warner has seven main areas of comparison, so click through to see how the two products stack up.

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Against Waiting for Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew follows Betteridge’s Law of Headlines:

But, lets prepare for it in terms of the technical capabilities we line up in our existing data architecture.

The hype curve around Microsoft Fabric since its announcement earlier in the year has been huge. The problem is, we now face some difficult questions in terms of our technology estate. Especially if we have designs and a project already in flight using other Azure Resources.

Read on for Paul’s thoughts on the matter and why you shouldn’t wait until Microsoft Fabric is officially out—use what is available in the meantime and then decide whether you want to make a transition. Paul leaves one thing in the margins that I would want to make clear: if this is your plan, avoid the dedicated SQL pool unless you absolutely need it or plan to stay on Synapse once Fabric is GA.

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Tenant Configuration in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-08-22 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld collects some data:

It has been quiet for a few weeks due to summer break. But now, it’s time to ramp up again and continue posting about Fabric. This time, I’ll start with a question that many Fabric (and Power BI) users ask themselves: “What does my tenant configuration look like?”. Often, users find themselves eager to explore new features they’ve come across online. But somehow, they cannot get it to work, or the feature does not even show for them.

In this blog, I’ll elaborate on the challenges and scenarios in which questions like these come up, and what you can do as a Fabric / Power BI administrator to ease answering this question.

Read on for one of the most common scenarios.

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Naming Artifacts in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-08-18 by Kevin Feasel

Johnny Winter shares some advice:

With Fabric being a unified platform, the worlds of Power BI Developer and Data Engineer collide. So is a solid naming convention a good idea?

At Advancing Analytics, we say yes.

In fact, given the breadth of the platform and the variety of artifacts available for use in Fabric, it becomes even more important to have a strategy to be able to organise these items and make them quick and easy to identify.

Read on to see what Johnny recommends.

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Microsoft Fabric Notebooks and Compute Limits

Published 2023-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens hits a wall:

In this case, my notebook threw an error at me but the command seemed to finish without any issue. Sounds vague? It did to me. The notebookcell I tried to run had a lot of stuff happening at the same time.

As you can see in the above screenshot, the status shows green checkmarks but there’s an error as well. The error message was not really clear to me, but that can really be me lack of deep level experience. So, I logged a call with Microsoft Support and see what they could come up with.

I’ve had enough experience with Spark to see the issue and figure the response, but click through for the screenshot and what Reitse did to resolve the issue.

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Creating Sprint Review Reports with Azure DevOps and Fabric

Published 2023-08-15 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant checks the burndown:

In this post I want to cover using Azure DevOps Analytics views and Microsoft Fabric to create Sprint review dashboards.

I consider this post to be a sequel to one of my post popular posts that covered using Azure DevOps Analytics views and Power BI to create Sprint review dashboards. For four very good reasons.

Read on for those reasons, along with the steps Kevin took.

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Diving into the Microsoft Fabric Copy Activity

Published 2023-08-11 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad does more than copies:

Copy Activity is one of the most commonly used activities in Microsoft Fabric’s Data Factory Pipeline. The Copy Activity copies the data from a source to a destination. However, there is more to that rather than just a simple copy. In this article, you will learn what Copy Activity is, its rationale, how it works, and its configuration options.

Reza has a video, as well as a demo-heavy full-length article on the topic.

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Logging Notebook Runs in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-08-04 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens checks the logs:

I reported an issue yesterday with Microsoft Support and during the following call today (they’re really quick to set up an initial meeting), the support engineer showed me where I can find a lot of logging information.
Suppose you’ve got a notebook that has been run a few times. The front-end will only retain the information from the last run. If you see an error, for example this one

Click through to learn where you can find these execution logs.

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Microsoft Fabric Licensing and Capacity

Published 2023-08-03 by Kevin Feasel

Aimee Johnson explains how Microsoft Fabric licensing works:

Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service platform (SaaS) which enables you to build an end-to-end analytics solution without the need to spin up complex infrastructure. If you want to know more about Microsoft Fabric then check out our introduction blog post which you can find here.

Since Microsoft Fabric has been announced there have been many questions and queries about licensing and in this blog post I will go through everything you need to know!

One thing I keep forgetting is that Power BI Premium P1 is equivalent to Fabric F64; I keep wanting it to be F32 or F16, but that’s because I’m frugal that way.

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