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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Shortcuts and Table Clones in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-07-13 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens takes a shortcut:

A few days ago, I heard the term table clone for the first time, it’s preview release date was to be confirmed and I had no idea what it was about. Two days later, a video emerged where the table clone was explained on a high level. At that point, I started to wonder what the differences are between a table clone and a shortcut. So let’s dig a little into that question!

First I’m going to create a shortcut, then a clone and finally compare the two.

Read on for the comparison, as these are quite different things.

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Fabric Data Integration

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev reviews the primary methods for data ingestion in Microsoft Fabric:

Fabric supports three options for automated data integration: Data Pipeline (Azure Data Factory pipeline), Dataflow Gen2 (Power BI dataflow), and Notebook (Spark). I summarize these three options in the following table, which loosely resembles the Microsoft comparison table but with my take on it.

Read on for Teo’s thoughts on the matter.

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Microsoft Fabric Architectural Icons

Published 2023-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld imports some icons:

In the past, I’ve made a draw.io file for Power BI to help you using the right icons to design your solutions and make architectural diagrams. With Fabric, a bunch of new services and icons have been introduced. This asks for a new draw.io file.

With this blog, I will provide the draw.io file for all new icons and elements of Fabric.

Click through for that link. Also note that you might be more familiar with the new name of draw.io, diagrams.net.

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Tips for Performance Testing Direct Lake Mode in Power BI

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us some performance testing advice:

If you’re excited about Direct Lake mode in Fabric you’re probably going to want to test it with some of your own data, and in particular look at DAX query performance. Before you do so, though, there are a few things to know about performance testing with Direct Lake datasets that are slightly different from what you might be used to with Import mode or DirectQuery datasets.

Chris shares some great advice and takes us through a good approach for testing. This post is all about the how, not the results.

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An Overview of Microsoft Fabric Terminology

Published 2023-07-10 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi takes us through some terms:

In this blog post, I will explain some of the key concepts, personas, and terminologies related to Microsoft Fabric, a SaaS analytics platform for the era of AI. If you are not familiar with the basic concepts of SaaS analytics platforms and how Microsoft Fabric fits in, I recommend you read my previous blog post, where I explain them in detail.

Click through to learn more about what terms like “tenant,” “capacity,” and “persona” mean in the context of Microsoft Fabric.

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Migrating the Serverless SQL Pool to Fabric

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant makes a move:

By the end of this post, you will know how to migrate serverless SQL Pool objects to a Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse using Azure DevOps. Along the way I share plenty of links and advice.

Please note that Microsoft Fabric is currently in Public Preview and what you see in this post is subject to change.

This is the relatively easy one. The real challenge will be dedicated SQL pool migration.

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Thoughts on Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2023-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev continues a series on digging into Microsoft Fabric components:

Continuing our Power BI Fabric journey, let’s look at another of its engines that I personally care about – Fabric Warehouse (aka as Synapse Data Warehouse). Most of my real-life projects require integrating data from multiple data sources into a centralized repository (commonly referred to as a data warehouse) that centralizes trusted data and serves it as a source to Power BI and Analysis Services semantic models. Due to the venerable history of relational databases and other benefits, I’ve been relying on relational databases powered by SQL Server to host the data warehouse. This usually entails a compromise between scalability and budget. Therefore, Azure-based projects with low data volumes (up to a few million rows) typically host the warehouse in a cost-effective Azure SQL Database, while large scale projects aim for Synapse SQL Dedicated Pools. And now there is a new option on the horizon – Fabric Warehouse. But where does it fit in?

Teo gives us some real talk on this one, with plenty of ugly.

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On-Demand Loading and Direct Lake in Power BI

Published 2023-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us the beginnings of an origin story:

For any Power BI person, Direct Lake mode is the killer feature of Fabric. Import mode report performance (or near enough) direct on data from the lake, with none of the waiting around for data to refresh! It seems too good to be true. How can it be possible?

The full answer, going into detail about how data from Delta tables is transcoded to Power BI’s in-memory format, is too long for one blog post. But in part it is possible through something that existed before Fabric but which didn’t gain much attention: on-demand loading. 

Click through for another blog post on the topic and an idea of how these tie together.

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Loading Data from On-Premises SQL Server into Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-07-03 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens spends an hour or so:

In my previous blogs, I’ve written about Fabric and all the cool things it can do. Thing is, my load tests were based on files. Either CSV or Delta. But in reality, a lot of data comes from an on-premises database server. In reality, you might connect to a SQL 2008 instance or maybe even older. Truth be told, I haven’t got an instance in that version/edition around anymore. So I had to use SQL Server 2019, a version I’m encountering more often nowadays.

For this blog, it won’t make much sense to create a humongous database and try to get all the data in. Fabric will cope, the major issue (in my experience) is the internet connection between my local database and the Fabric environment. One thing I’m really curious about is if Fabric will have the Link capability that was introduced for Synapse Analytics and SQL Server 2022.

There’s no Link capability currently available, so Reitse does the next-best thing and uses Fabric pipelines.

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Thoughts on Fabric Data Wrangler

Published 2023-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers tries out a tool:

I was going through my twitter feed and I came across this tweet where they spoke about the Data Wrangler Calling all #Python users! Have you tried Data Wrangler in #MicrosoftFabric?

I thought I would give this a try and that was the idea for my blog post. I honestly had no idea that firstly was this possible, but second that it is so easy for data wrangler to do all the hard work for me

I am going to demonstrate 2 transformations in this blog post, the first will be changing the d_date from date to datetime and then using the columns from examples I am going to create a new column where it concatenates 2 columns delimited with a double pipe command.

Read on for Gilbert’s thoughts.

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