Azure Data and Power BI News (April 2022)

April is over. What a totally crazy month it was for me! First, exactly on my birthday I moved to a new (dream!) role at Microsoft - Senior Program Manager on Azure Synapse Analytics product team. I'm incredibly excited about working close to both technology and community at the same time! Then I celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary! There was definitely a lot to celebrate! ??

The change of role influenced my decision to continue this newsletter in English so that community members around the world can read and comment on my content without having to translate from - quite difficult - Polish language. I hope that my Polish readers do not mind and will continue to find something interesting in this newsletter.

And now to the point, news in Azure data services and Power BI.

Azure

• First things first ;-) If you want to follow what's going on in Azure Synapse Analytics and actively support Azure Synapse community, you can use the following resources: Developer Community Hub (here you can find all important links and resources), Blog (here we share news and best practices), Monthly Updates (our monthly blog posts presenting announced features), YouTube (watch, subscribe and comment videos recorded by the product team and community members), Twitter (follow us and share your thoughts with us), Ideas (here you can share and vote on ideas for how to make Azure Synapse better). I'll remind you these links many times in the future ;-)
• Last month update for Azure Synapse Analytics contained a lot of news. My favorites were the following: wildcards in custom folder hierarchies of data lake under lake databases, Public Preview of Apache Spark 3.2 on Azure Synapse (excellent job by the open-source community - tons of enhancements and fixed issues, see release notes), notebook snapshots (great for troubleshooting) and referencing unpublished notebooks (you can now reference with %run notebooks that are not committed - great from developer experience point of view). Also, note that in April we got General Availability of Azure Synapse database templates (including three new templates for healthcare).
• If you work with Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pools, you may be interested in Azure Synapse Analyzer Report, which allows to monitor and improve the performance of these pools (it can help you to spot the following issues: data skewness, large replicate tables, missing and outdated statistics, bad partitioning).
• And last but not least about Azure Synapse, do not miss the latest videos: the MVP Series video with Cathrine Wilhelmsen showing a really cool demo of data integration and exploration based on LEGO dataset, the Data Exposed video with Armando Lacerda on how to use Azure Synapse together with Azure SQL and - published just yesterday (I know, it's May already, but this series looks so promising!) - the Introduction to Azure Synapse Analytics from Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlanc on Guy in a Cube YouTube channel.
• Azure Purview is now Microsoft Purview. For some reasoning behind this change read the official announcement and watch the video on Microsoft Security YouTube channel. To find out what's included in the renamed product, read the post on Microsoft Security blog.
• Azure Data Factory got some nice improvements to the pipeline monitoring experience. You can now export pipeline runs to CSV, open selected runs in separate tabs and quickly clear filters in the Pipeline runs view.
• Azure SQL fans - there was something for you in April too! Azure SQL Managed Instance team announced Private Preview of Online Database Move and Copy for SQL Managed Instance (copying/moving databases between SQLMI instances with minimal downtime). Also, we got General Availability of Azure SQL Migration extension for Azure Data Studio (great for end-to-end migration process - from assessment to migration with minimal downtime, check documentation for more details). And finally, two biggest news: Public Preview of reverse migration from Azure SQL DB Hyperscale to General Purpose tier (long awaited, but make sure you read the limitations section!) and General Availability of Change Data Capture (CDC) in Azure SQL!
• In April I found some cool resources for Machine Learning geeks. First, I noticed that LinkedIn's feature store (Feathr) is now available on Azure (it's open source, extensible and integrated with Azure services). Later, I spotted the second version of Azure MLOps solution accelerator.
• April was also full of Azure data community activities! Some great examples I read last month: Simon Whiteley (Microsoft MVP) shared his summary of April update for Azure Synapse (with some special focus on Apache Spark 3.2), two Microsoft MVPs - Nikola Ilic and Andy Cutler - started a series of blog posts Mastering DP-500 Exam (read more about DP-500 exam), Batuhan Tüter (Microsoft) wrote a step-by-step guideline on how to implement Azure Synapse Lake Database with Data Flows, Robert Thompson and Geoff Freeman shared some details on how T-Mobile implemented Delta Lakehouse using Azure Synapse, Renee Pajta (Microsoft) posted a nice article on how to implement chargeback mechanism for Azure Synapse pipelines, Bob Duffy (Microsoft MVP) described how to deal with JSON files in Azure Synapse, we got a new blog post from Kevin Chant (Microsoft MVP) on how to keep Azure Synapse secrets in Azure DevOps (also check for Kevin's repository on GitHub, where you can find CI/CD template for Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pools), Joost van Rossum (Microsoft MVP) wrote a nice blog post on how to refresh Power BI datasets with Azure Data Factory or Azure Synapse pipelines, and we had a strong Polish accent - Adrian Chodkowski wrote an extensive blog post on Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL pools (written in Polish).
• Event alert! In May you don't want to miss Microsoft Build (May 24-26)! Tons of news and announcements coming at this event. And I'm going to be there in the Connection zone :-) Also, if you're interested in Azure Synapse, do not miss the deadline (May 27) of Call for Speakers for Data Toboggan - Cool Runnings 2022 (event planned for July 9). And last but not least - we meet with some of you at SQLDay 2022 in Wroclaw very soon (I'll deliver a keynote, a workshop and a breakout session there)!

Power BI

• Power BI April Feature Summary was a bit like a continuation of what we got in March. Some new features announced: error bars for bar chart, updates to Power BI Goals (push notifications, bulk uploads, sharing and access banner), support for visual interaction in mobile layout, multiple updates to the New Format Pane, drill actions from tooltips for matrix, line and area charts.
• Some new features were announced separately last month: Read permissions required when using composite model on Power BI (previously it required Build permissions, so it's a big step towards making building composite models easier from the administration perspective!), updates to subscription management and saving Analyze in Excel workbooks to OneDrive for Business (with default opening in Excel for the web).
• In Power BI documentation we got two new articles from Melissa Coates on Power BI adoption roadmap. If you're not familiar with this part of Power BI documentation and it happens that you work on BI deployments for large Enterprise, I strongly recommend becoming familiar with this really well structured guideline.
• This month for Power BI I'd like to share a customer story - read how Vodafone is using Power Platform and SharePoint Online to forecast and request engineering resources and much more.

You can find all the official April announcements for Azure and Power BI on the Azure Updates website and the Power BI blog. In addition, you can follow Azure updates in a more "graphical" form using Azure Charts (Heat Map), and with Power BI you can be up to date thanks to the Power BI Release Plan report.

I hope you enjoyed this monthly summary. I'm looking forward to reading your comments and hearing from you about your Azure Data and Power BI finds in April!

PS. And I hope the spring (the on from the image at the top of this article) will remain with us for a while and will let us enjoy a bit of a sunny weather! ??