There’s been an exciting new announcement at Microsoft Build in the form of Microsoft Fabric, a unified platform that brings together Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Data Science, Real-time analytics, and Power BI. It’s an evolution of Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI from their current forms. You can read the announcement here. Relevant Links Trial: Microsoft Fabric Community site: Home – Microsoft Fabric Community Ideas: Home (microsoft.com) Product website: Introducing Microsoft Fabric: The data platform for the era of AI | Azure Blog | Microsoft Azure Documentation: Microsoft Fa ..read more

Microsoft recently released the ability to configure Synapse Link for Dataverse and use Delta Lake as the export format. As I’ve dived into the Synapse Link for Dataverse feature recently with exporting Dynamics 365 Sales data, I was keen to get hands on with the Delta Lake export option. Delta Lake is a data and transaction storage file format very popular in Lakehouse implementations and is becoming a very popular format that enables decoupling storage with compute. More info here. Here’s my initial experience and thoughts about it and over the coming weeks I’ll dive a little deeper to see ..read more

In this blog I’m continuing my series about using Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics together and the features between the 2 platforms that are useful. The first blog covered ResultSet Caching in Dedicated SQL Pools so please check that out if you haven’t already. In this blog we’ll be looking at settings within Power BI that can control the parallel loading (executing) of SQL queries on the Synapse SQL Pools. Controlling the number of queries that are sent in parallel to either Dedicated SQL Pools or Serverless SQL Pools can have an effect on loading performance and source system resource ..read more

Every so often the “star schema is dead! dimensional modelling is dead!” discussion rolls around again, and we end up in endless debates about the star schema, the alternatives, and I always end up not quite so satisfied with those alternatives (but that’s for another day). Some of those discussions can go off piste a little, because the star schema can be used in a data warehouse, a data mart, and a BI tool model, it has flexibility of usage that perhaps designs like data vault do not. So sometimes we’re not comparing apples to apples (hey, star schemas load and present data quite nicely fr ..read more

Here’s an Azure Synapse Serverless SQL Pools Cheat Sheet I created to help anyone reference any objects or syntax they may wish to create or use in Serverless SQL Pools. Feel free to reach out here with any comments or suggestions. Download 2 page Cheat Sheet here ..read more

Always ask “why.” I really couldn’t think of a better blog title, I usually do technical stuff and the title writes itself in most cases. I also write more technical blog posts because that’s my comfort zone, I prefer those to “thought” blogs. But a recent blog about an organisation moving their infrastructure away from the cloud and onto their own managed environment got me thinking about the “why” of the cloud. And more specifically in my work world, the constant ask of “should we move our data warehouse into the cloud?” “Do we need to be using cloud data platforms?”, “Should we put all ou ..read more

Welcome to this new blog series in which I’ll be diving into both Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics features that can work together. These features are not exclusive between Synapse and Power BI though, they are simply features that enhance the experience between these platforms. E.G. as ResultSet Caching is a Synapse Dedicated SQL Pools feature, any SQL client that sends a SQL request to the Dedicated SQL Pool can benefit from this feature. What is ResultSet Caching? ResultSet Caching is a Dedicated SQL Pools feature which caches a dataset created using a SELECT query, for example a que ..read more

Some of the skills measured for the DP-500 Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate certification are changing on February 6th 2023 (thanks for the heads-up from Kevin Chant (t). Don’t panic, not much has changed (phew…) and comparing the pre-February 6th skills measured with the updated skills there are only 2 updates. FYI Non-English versions of the exam will be updated up to 8 weeks after the English language version. Click here for the official page including the updated skills measured document. Changes I’ll include the skills measured changes below, there are slight adjustments to the a ..read more

I’ve been diving into Synapse Link for Dataverse recently for a project and created a series of videos going through setting up Synapse Link with Dynamics 365 Sales and syncronising with Azure Synapse Analytics. I’ve also looked at some of the advanced options which are useful for downstream data processing and incremental data loading. There are some issues with Synapse Link currently including no support for exporting to Parquet, this is coming “very soon” apparently. Overall my experience has been positive. The Synapse Link for Dataverse series is on a playlist here. If you haven’t yet su ..read more

Around November 2022, Microsoft announced a new feature within Power BI which allows you to migrate Tabular models from Azure Analysis Services into Power BI Premium. This interested me as more and more it seems Microsoft want people to migrate away from Analysis Services and into Power BI. Migrate Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium Migration Overview Here is the link to the official blog post announcement. Links to all the Microsoft documentation is available in the References section. Accelerate your migration experience from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium with the ..read more