A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Andy Leonard kicks off a trial:
Are you interested in learning more about Microsoft Fabric?
One way to begin tinkering with the new platform is to start a free trial. At the time of this post, a free trial is available here:
Read on for instructions on how to try Fabric out. Now that Fabric is in GA, you’ll have to pay once the trial is over, but this does at least give you some time to check it out before then.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar wants readability:
JSON is ubiquitous, particularly when working with APIs and logs. Its unstructured nature makes it highly flexible for handling anything from a simple array to a complex nested structure. However, this can also make it challenging for data analysis. When parsing JSON, it’s crucial to understand its structure so you can flatten it and convert it into a tabular format for analysis. Once the structure is identified, you can use pandas or PySpark to explode or normalize it into the desired shape. In this article, I will explain the method I use. While this approach is applicable to any notebook, there is a specific trick to make it work in a Fabric notebook.
Read on for that trick.
Comments closedEugene Meidinger is ready to be at the intersection of Dunning-Kreuger and Imposter Syndrome:
I’ve written before about struggling to learn Azure Synapse, and I’ve struggled as well with getting excited about Microsoft Fabric. I think the pitch and the potential of Microsoft Fabric is real. The issue is that it solves problems I don’t have. In my work, I don’t deal with data so big that Power BI can’t handle it. I don’t deal with data so unstructured that Power Query can’t handle it.
But I know I need to learn Fabric. Power BI is a part of Fabric, the integrations are only going to continue to improve. If nothing else, I need to be able to tell customers if they should look into using Fabric or not. So what do you do when there is a technology you aren’t excited about, but have to learn?
Read on for Eugene’s scenario, which is certainly more interesting than Adventure Works.
Comments closedReitse Eskens shares some advice:
Last week the big announcement came at Microsoft Ignite, Fabric is GA.
Very cool, a lot of noise again for this shiny toolbox, but do we need to abandon everything and focus solely on the new toys?
Before I’ll answer that question, let’s look at a few moving parts of Fabric.
I think it’s still 1-2 years out from being fully baked. My hope is that there are (or will be) enough pieces in place to make it useful for enough scenarios that people don’t notice the gaps too much. There’s a lot of potential here and I don’t want Fabric to end up with a reputation of “too much stuff is missing to use it” because that reputation is hard to shake.
Comments closedSandeep Pawar scripts out some lakehouse work:
At MS Ignite, Microsoft unveiled a variety of new APIs designed for working with Fabric items, such as workspaces, Spark jobs, lakehouses, warehouses, ML items, and more. You can find detailed information about these APIs here. These APIs will be critical in the automation and CI/CD of Fabric workloads.
With the release of these APIs, a new method has been added to the
mssparkutilslibrary to simplify working with lakehouses. In this blog, I will explore the available options and provide examples. Please note that at the time of writing this blog, the information has not been published on the official documentation page, so keep an eye on the documentation for changes.
This looks to be quite useful for CI/CD work.
Comments closedMatt Gordon gives us the lowdown:
At their Microsoft Build conference in May 2023, Microsoft announced the company’s new unified analytics solution, Microsoft Fabric. As with any major product launch from a major cloud provider, a tremendous amount of noise and smoke accompanied the debut.
After all, when a company the size of Microsoft invests significantly in a product, you can be assured that the marketing blitz will be significant, too – and that was certainly the case with Fabric. The blitz will ramp up even further now that Microsoft announced at Microsoft Ignite that Fabric is already generally available (GA).
Behind that noise and smoke, though, all many of our customers and partners want to know is: Should I care? And if so, why? Let’s dive into this topic together from the perspective of a few key personas found at many companies.
Read on for Matt’s thoughts on the topic.
Comments closedReza Rad talks version control:
Power BI and Microsoft Fabric use Azure DevOps as the core component for their version and source control. The integration with Azure DevOps and Git helps maintain a copy of the source code and version it. It allows access to it anytime needed, plus the multi-development aspect added. In this article and video, you will learn how this integration works.
Click through for the article and video.
Comments closedLet’s try to break down these concepts and explain them as simple as possible:
Bursting lets you use more power than you purchased (within the specific timeframe)! Smoothing takes care that this power is “under control” within that same timeframe. Easy, right:)? I know, I know, so let’s break this further down…
Read on for some of the nuance behind this.
Comments closedNikola 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.
Comments closedBen 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.
Comments closed