What a better way to spend a lazy holiday afternoon than to do more Fabric performance testing? In my previous post, I shared my results from a single-threaded ETL load test to gauge the F2 ingest performance and F2 did pretty well (or at least outperformed Azure SQL DB). Will F2 hold as parallelism increases? Throughput testing is especially important for report loads because parallel…
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As inspired by Amir Netz's encouragement to partners to test the Fabric F2 capacity performance, I got on a quest to test what it would do to ETL loads for Fabric Warehouse. I must admit that I was skeptical that a quarter of a core would take a warehouse off the ground, but as usual, life proved me wrong and "wrong" is a big understatement…
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I’ve covered my first impression about Microsoft Fabric in a series of blogs starting with this one. In the recap, I said that certain features might benefit organizations that are already on Power BI Premium because all Fabric features are available in Power BI Premium plans. However, as they stand, features such as Lakehouse Copy to Table (no automated synchronization), ADF pipelines (no connectivity to…
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I might have identified at last a good case for Microsoft Fabric, but I'll be in a better position to confirm after a POC with larger datasets. Dynamics Online, aka Dynamics 365, epitomizes the customer's struggle to export their data hosted in SaaS cloud offerings for analytics or other purposes. Since unfortunately Microsoft doesn't provide direct access to the Dynamics native storage (Azure SQL Database),…
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Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, December 4th, at 6:30 PM ET. William Rodriguez will review the key Fabric components whilst walking through a full Financial deployment: data engineering with a tiered medallion architecture, data science with forecasting and other advanced analytics, and data analysis with Power BI. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, November 6th, at 6:30 PM ET. Macro Russo will introduce us to the community tool Bravo for Power BI. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. I'll sponsor the event. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO OUR MEETING POLICY.…
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Almost every BI project requires at least two environments, such as DEV and PROD. Unless I've missed something, one Azure Data Factory caveat irrespective of the code promotion path (manual or automated with Azure DevOps or Git CI/CD) is that it uses ARM template deployment where the template contains all the artifacts. The equivalent for database schema deployment would be to script the entire database…
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Lo and behold, Azure Data Factory now supports deactivating activities as a preview feature. It took only seven years… You can deactivate/activate activity by right-clicking it in the canvas or from its General settings. You can also configure how the subsequent activities should treat a deactivated activity, with Succeeded being the most common outcome.
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Someone asked the other day for my opinion about the open-source dbt tool for ETL. I hadn't heard about it. Next thing I've noticed was that Fabric Warehouse added support for it, so I got inspired to take a first look. Seems like an ELT-oriented tool. Good, I'm a big fan of the ELT pattern whose virtues I extolled many times here. But a Python-based…
Read article Atlanta BI fans, please join us for the next meeting on Monday, October 2nd, at 6:30 PM ET. Michael Hewitt will share 30 tips to make you more productive with everything Power BI. Your humble correspondent will help you catch up on Microsoft BI latest. For more details and sign up, visit our group page. PLEASE NOTE A CHANGE TO OUR MEETING POLICY. WE HAVE…
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