We’re back with another data culture post and video with swords, and this time we’re bringing out the big blade. This time we’re bringing out the montante. I didn’t knock anything over with this six foot sword and no one is more surprised than me In the 1500s and 1600s the montante was the expert’s weapon, perfect for “one against many” scenarios. By the 1700s it had become the symbol of the fencing master’s authority. In this video we look at how learning the montante and learning the best practices presented in this blog video series and the Power BI adoption roadmap have a lot more in commo ..read more

There’s a new data culture video! After I finished my 2020 video and blog series on building a data culture, I figured I would revisit this topic at some point. I didn’t expect it to take quite so long, but life is complicated and challenging. It’s been nearly three years[1] since the last video in the “Building a data culture” series, and a lot has changed in that that time: a new house in a new city on the other side of the country, a new home office studio with much more space, new equipment – and new swords! This new video is the first of two fun appendices to the videos that make up the ..read more

Last week Microsoft published the public product roadmap, announcing it at the Microsoft Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas. If you haven’t looked at it already, you should check it out now at https://aka.ms/FabricRoadmap.[1] Product roadmaps are important because they let customers or potential customers understand how a product will evolve. What features and capabilities that aren’t available today are coming, and when will each one arrive? As with any interesting information domain, the details will change over time. Although the roadmap is the “single source of truth” for planned impr ..read more

Microsoft Fabric has only been in preview for a week, and I’ve already written one post that covers data governance – do we really need another one already? I think we do. Over the weekend I got this reply via Mastodon. Dave’s excellent question and comment[1] got me thinking about why OneLake feels so important to him (and to me) even though Fabric is so much more than any one part – even a part as central as OneLake. The more I thought about it, the more the pieces fell into place in my mind, and the more I found myself thinking about one of my favorite quotes[2]: A complex system that wor ..read more

Over the holiday weekend I joined Adam Saxton for a Fabric-focused Guy in a Cube live stream. It was a ton of fun, as these streams always are, and we ended up going for 90 minutes instead of the scheduled 60[1]. Come for the hard-earned wisdom. Stay for the ridiculous facial expressions. During the stream there were a few questions (including this one) where the answer involved understanding where Power BI ends and Microsoft Fabric begins. I suspect that this will be a common source of confusion in these early days of Fabric, and I hope this post will help clarify things. Let’s begin at the b ..read more

If you’ve read the Power BI adoption roadmap or attended any of the full-day training sessions I’ve been doing with MVP Melissa Coates[1], you know how important it is to manage settings in your Power BI tenant, both for governance and for user enablement. This week, Microsoft made this job easier with the introduction of a new GetTenantSettings API. DALL-E prompt “power bi tenant settings administrator” because I couldn’t think of a better image to use Until now, there hasn’t been a way to programmatically monitor tenant settings. Administrators needed to manually review and document settings ..read more

The data internet this week is awash with news and information about Microsoft Fabric. My Introducing Microsoft Fabric post on Tuesday got just under ten thousand views in the first 24 hours, which I believe is a record for this blog. Even more exciting than the numbers are the comments. Bike4thewin replied with this excellent comment and request: I would love to hear your thought on how to adopt this on Enterprise level and what could be the best practices to govern the content that goes into OneLake. In real life, I’m not sure you want everyone in the organisation to be able to do all of th ..read more

On Friday June 9th, Data Ceili – Ireland’s biggest Microsoft data platform event  – returns to Trinity College in Dublin! You already know that I’ll be there with MVP Melissa Coates on June 8th to present a full-day pre-conference training day session on Power BI adoption best practices[1]. Hopefully you’re already registered, and if not you can register today. Today I can announce that there will be two Microsoft Fabric sessions during the main Data Ceili event on Friday. Both will be presented by members of the Fabric CAT team at Microsoft, and both will be based on deep engagement with ..read more

You read that correctly. Data moshpit. This September the greatest thing in the history of great things happening will happen. On Saturday September 16, in a metal club in Berlin, data platform MVPs Ben Kettner and Frank Geisler are JOINing[1] the two best things in the world: data and heavy metal. Data Moshpit is a one-day community event with a heavy metal theme. The sessions will be metal. The speakers will be metal. The atmosphere will be metal. There will be beer and food and if my experience at metal shows in Germany have taught me anything, lots of brothers of metal and sisters of stea ..read more

May the fourth be with you, but May the fifth and sixth I hope you’ll be with me – in New York City! Registration is now open for SQL Saturday NYC 2023, and it’s likely to fill up pretty quickly given the great schedule and exciting lineup of speakers. The event is hosted at Microsoft’s Times Square offices, and attendance is capped at 400 people. If you’re interested in a free day of data-centric learning with some career-focused sessions[1], please register today and block your calendar. You can register here for the free SQL Saturday event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sql-saturday-new-yor ..read more