Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Microsoft Fabric

Fabric Studio 1.0

Published 2024-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl makes an announcement:

I am very proud to announce the first public release of Fabric Studio v1.0 – a VSCode extension that allows you to manage and develop your Fabric workspace(s). Similar to Power BI Studio, it seamlessly integrates into VSCode for increased productivity for professional developers and admins alike.

Click through for some of the functionality available in Fabric Studio. You can download the extension from the VS Code marketplace and Gerhard includes a link to the GitHub repo in the blog post.

Comments closed

Data Transformation with Dataflows Gen2

Published 2024-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Boniface Muchendu provides an overview of Dataflows Gen2 in Microsoft Fabric:

Welcome to a journey into the world of data automation! Imagine working in an organization bustling with data scientists and analysts. In such an environment, you often need to gather and combine data from various sources for further analysis. You could do this manually, but why not leverage automation? In this blog, we’ll explore how to apply automation on data transformations using Dataflows Gen2 in Microsoft Fabric.

Admitting that I am not the primary audience for Dataflows Gen2, I’d still much rather write a Spark notebook and call it a day.

Comments closed

Geospatial Data Exploration in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar goes on a journey:

Simon Willison is one of my favorite bloggers. In fact, what I blog, how I blog & test, is inspired by him. He wrote a blog a couple of weeks ago about FourSquare Places data that has been open-sourced. I was exploring this dataset and ended up creating a few maps. I love OrgApps in Fabric and I truly believe as it matures, it will be THE way for analysts & data scientists to provide rich insights + traditional reports to business users. Notebooks can augment the Power BI reports to provide insights that are otherwise not possible. I have submitted a session on this topic to FabCon ‘25, let’s see. If it is selected, I hope to show how transformational it is and how businesses can use it.

Click through for a video and the notebook that Sandeep demonstrated.

Comments closed

Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model via Eventstreams

Published 2024-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb builds a Rube Goldberg device:

Following on from my last post where I showed how to send data from Power Automate to a Fabric Eventstream, in this post I’m going to show how to use it to solve one of my favourite problems: refreshing a Power BI semantic model that uses an Excel workbook stored in OneDrive as a source when that Excel workbook is modified.

Now before I go on I want to be clear that I know this is a ridiculously over-engineered and expensive (in terms of CUs) solution, and that you can do almost the same thing just using Power Automate or in several other different ways – see my colleague Mark Pryce-Maher’s recent videos on using Fabric Open Mirroring with Excel for example. I’m doing this to teach myself Fabric Eventstreams and Activator and see what’s possible with them. Please excuse any mistakes or bad practices.

Click through for the process.

Comments closed

Mounding ADF Instances in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck has an existing Azure Data Factory:

We recently started using Microsoft Fabric for our cloud data platform. However, we already have quite an estate of Azure data services running in our company, including a huge number of Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines. It seems cumbersome to migrate all those pipelines to Microsoft Fabric, especially because some features are not supported yet and ADF is the mature choice at the moment. We like the concept of Microsoft Fabric’s centralization, where everything is managed in one platform. Is there an option to manage ADF in Fabric?

Read on for the answer, but make sure to check out its limitations as well.

Comments closed

Delta Tables in Microsoft Fabric with Polars

Published 2024-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar tries out the Polars library:

The much-anticipated Python notebook in Fabric is finally available and the Fabric users have already developed cool libraries and blogged about the usefulness of these notebooks. Duckdb is everyone’s favorite, but I am a Python guy so here is quick overview of how you can use Polars in the Python notebook.

Polars is an open-source library that uses a Rust engine and supports multi-threaded execution. This means it’s significantly faster than pandas and, in some cases, even faster than Spark. It can efficiently use the limited resources available in Python notebooks (2 cores, 16GB RAM). Polars v1.6 is installed in the default Python notebook environment. So, let’s see how to perform some common operations.

Read on to see how you can load and write out files via Polars.

Comments closed

External Data Sharing in OneLake

Published 2024-12-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard shares some info about sharing some info:

At #MSIgnite Microsoft announced a new feature in Fabric that allows people from one organization to share data with people from another organization. You might ask yourself why is this even news, and rightly so. Up until last week, professionals have had to use tools like (S)FTP clients like FileZilla, Azure Storage Explorer, WeTransfer or similar products in order to share data. Some of these tools are in fact hard to use and/or understand for a great number of business users – they are familiar with Windows and the Office suite and not much more. This is all to be expected, as business users in general should focus on business stuff rather than IT stuff.

Read on to see how this has changed, and an update to what I consider one of the coolest products to come out of Microsoft Fabric.

Comments closed

Sending Data from Power Automate to Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb uses Eventstreams:

Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence features are, for me, the most interesting things to learn about in the platform. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert in them – far from it – but they are quite easy to use and they open up some interesting possibilities for low-code/no-code people like me. The other day I was wondering if it was possible to send events and data from Power Automate to Fabric using Eventstreams and it turns out it is quite easy to do.

Read on to see just how easy it is. And there’s a good question from a reader about using other languages, such as Powershell. Turns out the answer is yes.

Comments closed

Determining Power BI Report Fields in Use

Published 2024-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria performs a search:

Have you ever wondered where a certain field is used in a report? Or maybe you need an easy way to find broken field references in a report? Certain 3rd-party tools such as Measure Killer and Power BI Helper (not updated recently) have helped us with this task in the past. But now we can perform this task with a notebook in Fabric!

This is made possible by the Semantic Link Labs Python library. Please note that PBIR format is still in preview at the time of publishing this blog post, so use it at your own risk. Also, this works only on reports published to the Power BI service. Since this notebook is not making any changes to the report, I feel it’s pretty safe to run, but do remember that it uses CUs on your Fabric capacity while you run it.

Read on to see how it works.

Comments closed