I’m honored to be hosting T-SQL Tuesday — edition #196. For those who may not know the history, T-SQL Tuesday started back in December 2009 when Adam Machanic (Blog |LinkedIn) sent out the first invitation for what he called a monthly … Continue reading →
Why this comparison feels confusing If you’re a Power BI report author who’s just getting into Microsoft Fabric, you’ve probably asked the same question I hear over and over: am I supposed to stop using Power BI Desktop now? It’s … Continue reading →
A few weeks ago, I found myself staring at a slide full of new Microsoft AI names and thinking… wait a second. Work IQ. Fabric IQ. Foundry IQ. Agent 365. Agent Factory. And that’s before we even get into Copilot … Continue reading →
Organizations increasingly want Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric to coexist without duplicating data or fragmenting governance. With Fabric OneLake and open table formats like Iceberg and Delta, there are now multiple ways to make Snowflake data available inside Fabric—each with different … Continue reading →
I remember a meeting where a client’s CEO leaned in and asked me, “So, we have tons of data… Why can’t we just add AI and call it a day?” He was excited—who isn’t these days? But my team and … Continue reading →
Monitoring costs in Microsoft Fabric can be trickier than it first appears. You might assume it’s just a flat fee per capacity (easy, right?), but real-world usage tends to add complexity. Maybe you pause and resume a capacity, scale it … Continue reading →
Announced at Microsoft Ignite two weeks ago were many new product features related to the data platform. Check out the Major announcements and Book of News. I went through the many announcements and picked out the most interesting ones, so you don’t have to: Microsoft … Continue reading →
I had a great question asked of me the other day and thought I would turn the answer into a blog post. The question is “I’m an experienced DBA in SQL Server/SQL DB, and my company is looking to build … Continue reading →
I still see a lot of confusion about the functionality of Microsoft Purview ever since multiple products were combined into it, so I wanted to write this blog to help clear up that confusion. Microsoft Purview is a comprehensive solution … Continue reading →
A bunch of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon Vienna) recently. Here are all the new features that I found most interesting, with some released now and others coming soon: More info: FabCon Vienna: … Continue reading →
(Side note: Excited to share that the audio version of my book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh” is now accessible for those who prefer this format. The audio reader … Continue reading →
I want to talk about a fairly new product that you may not be aware of: Azure IoT Operations, which GA’d last November (it was first announced at Ignite in November 2023). Here is an excellent short video showing it … Continue reading →
A new feature has just been released in Microsoft Fabric that I was so impressed with that I decided to blog about it. Available in public preview is the ability to create a shortcut to a raw text file and … Continue reading →
I still remember my very first presentation many years ago. Someone in my team asked me to demo a project I’d been working on, and I was absolutely terrified. Public speaking is famously a top fear for most people, and … Continue reading →
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and AI, and some were very impressive. Below are my favorites. Everything announced at Build can be found in the Microsoft Build 2025 Book of News. Here you … Continue reading →
As discussed in my blog and book “Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh” (Amazon), organizations are often challenged with choosing the right data architecture to meet their business goals—especially as … Continue reading →
A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference recently. Here are all the new features that I found most interesting, with some released now and others coming soon: More info: FabCon 2025: Fueling … Continue reading →
In today’s data-driven world, organizations need the ability to analyze and act on data as it flows in real time. Microsoft Fabric provides a powerful ecosystem for real-time intelligence, enabling businesses to process, store, analyze, and visualize data with minimal … Continue reading →
There are three Azure SQL products with so many different deployment options, service tiers, and compute tiers that it can get quite confusing when choosing the right option for your workload. So, I thought I would write this blog to … Continue reading →
As I researched and wrote my OpenAI and LLMs blogs (see Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs, Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 2 and Introduction to OpenAI and LLMs – Part 3, along with a presentation on that topic … Continue reading →