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Category: Microsoft Fabric

An Overview of Microsoft Fabric Domains

Published 2023-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad provides an overview:

Microsoft Fabric introduced a new concept called Domains. Domains are more than just a separation of Fabric data items. They come with a whole lot of security, administration, and governance features, which brings the concept of data mesh into the world of data analytics using Microsoft Fabric. Domains are logical categorizations inside the OneLake. In this article and video, I will explain what domains are in Microsoft Fabric, why they are important, and their associated features and configurations.

Click through for both a video on the topic and a lengthy article.

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Initial Thoughts on the Microsoft Fabric Data Science Experience

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Tori Tompkins shares some thoughts:

Fabric is Microsoft’s recently announced SaaS all-in-one analytics platform. It brings together Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI into a single cohesive platform without the overhead of setting up resources, maintenance, and configuration. Fabric wouldn’t be an end-to-end data analytics platform without data science, so in this blog we will explore the data science and machine learning capabilities of Microsoft Fabric and assess where the platform fits in the completive data science landscape.

Click through for Tori’s overview, where Fabric does a good job in its preview, and where it currently falls short.

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Generating Tables from Files in Microsoft Fabric via Notebook

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres performs a bit of ELT:

When Microsoft Fabric was born, the only method to convert files to tables was using notebooks. Nowadays we have an easy-to-use UI feature for the conversion.

As I explained on the article about lakehouse and ETL, there are some scenarios where we still need to use notebooks for the conversion. One of these scenarios is when we need table partitioning.

Let’s make a step-by-step on this blog about how to use notebooks and table partitioning.

Click through to see how it all works.

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Adding a Service Principal to a Fabric Workspace via API

Published 2023-09-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld tackles a challenge:

Lately, I found myself struggling using the Power BI REST API to add a service principal to the (Fabric) workspace. After I engaged with some other folks, I managed to succeed. In this blog I will elaborate on the mistake I made and how I got it to work. For some this might be a less useful blog. Though, I still wanted to blog this even if it is for my own memory on how to do this.

Read on for the story.

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Documenting Power BI Workspaces with Fabric Notebooks

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Prathy Kamasami shares a use case for notebooks in Microsoft Fabric:

If you are a consultant like me, you know how hard it can be to access Power BI Admin API or Service Principal. Sometimes, you need to see all the workspaces you have permission for and what’s inside them. Well, I found with MS Fabric, we can use notebooks and achieve it with a few steps:

Read on for an enumeration of those four steps, as well as detailed instructions for each.

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Sending Azure Cost Management Data to Azure Data Explorer

Published 2023-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Brad Watts writes out some cost data:

Understanding your Azure Spend is one of the most important things you do as an Azure customer. Azure Cost Management is built into the platform to provide you insights. But we live in a world of data and looking at the Azure Cost Management data in a silo may not meet your organization’s needs. In those situations, we can solve that need by putting your Cost Management data into an analytical platform like Azure Data Explorer or Microsoft Fabric KQL Database. Here we can bring in or join additional data that’s useful, run ad-hoc queries and build visualization tying it all together.

Using the below repository, you’ll be able to utilize Azure Cost Management exports to setup an automated process that ingests the cost data into ADX or Fabric KQL Database.

There are several steps involved, but as Brad points out, you can do this either with Microsoft Fabric or with classic Azure Data Factory + Azure Data Explorer. I’d also throw in Azure Synapse Analytics, but that’s not as in vogue anymore.

Werner Zirkel also has a great comment showing how you can cut out most of the steps with Event Grid.

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Microsoft Fabric Presentations

Published 2023-09-11 by Kevin Feasel

Wolfgang Strasser opens a vault:

Are you searching for Microsoft Fabric Presentations? You want learn more about the new unified analytics solution?

There are plenty of presentation available around the internet – some only as recordings, some as PDFs only.

BUT – last week, I found a (now not more) hidden gem of Microsoft Fabric content on the internet – the Microsoft Fabric Readiness repository

Click through for the link to those presentations.

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Enabling Staging for Microsoft Fabric Dataflows

Published 2023-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shares some thoughts:

If you read this post that was published on the Fabric blog back in July, you’ll know that each Power Query query in a Fabric Gen2 dataflow has a property that determines whether its output is staged or not – where “staged” means that the output is written to the (soon-to-be hidden) Lakehouse linked to the dataflow, regardless of whether you have set a destination for the query output to be written to. Turning this on or off can have a big impact on your refresh times, making them a lot faster or a lot slower.

Chris shares a simple example of when staging might not be reasonable. This is going to be the less common scenario, however.

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Querying the Power BI REST API from Fabric Spark

Published 2023-09-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl makes the call:

Microsoft Fabric has a lot of different components which usually work very well together. However, even though Power BI is a fundamental part of Fabric, there is not really a tight integration between Data Engineering components and Power BI. In this blog post I will show you an easy and reusable way to query the Power BI REST API via Fabric SQL in a very straight forward way. The extracted data can then be stored in the data lake e.g. to create a history of your dataset refreshes, the state of your workspaces or any other information that is provided by the REST API.

Click through for a list of operations, followed by the code you’ll need to pull this off.

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Multiple Workspaces and Microsoft Fabric Git Integration

Published 2023-08-31 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant can’t stop at one:

In this post I want to cover working with Microsoft Fabric Git integration and multiple workspaces. By highlighting one method that you can use in the real-world.

I must admit that I have been very keen to test this particular way of working with Microsoft Fabric Git integration and multiple workspaces.

By the end of this post, you will know one way that you can work with Microsoft Fabric Git integration and multiple workspaces. Based on real-world working practices. Including multiple branches and pull requests.

Click through to see what Kevin has in mind usingg Azure DevOps.

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