Azure Data and Power BI News (December 2023)

?? Happy New Year! And so, we have just jumped to 2024. May this year be full of joy and success for all of us. How was my 2023? Not too bad, both in private life and at work (you know - Fabric GA landed in November ??, I also greatly expanded my network in the community).

?? My New Year's resolutions? I have three of them:

1. Take care of my health. Both physical and mental. Part of this resolution is about finding some more spare time for some new hobbies and sports, plus...
2. Spend less (near-to-zero) time on social media activity. In the 2023 retrospective, it turned out that social media still consumed a lot of time in my life. I need some of this time back. That's why you will see me less active on LinkedIn (I've already minimized my activity on Facebook and X). ?? IMPORTANT: The above applies to this newsletter as well. ??
3. Find a mentor. I want to grow even more as an individual and a professional, learn new things and plan my future career. I've already started working on this resolution by joining mentoring program at Microsoft.

Enough about me. I bet you read this newsletter to get some news on technology and community around it, right? Let's go then.

Microsoft

• Let's start with what's new in Microsoft Fabric. We got Microsoft Fabric December 2023 Update with many new features including Automatic Log Checkpointing for Fabric Warehouse , warehouse recovery , prebuilt Azure AI services in Fabric , Fabric Admin REST APIs , rich dataframe Preview in Notebook, KQL Database schema validation (.show database schema violations ) and Azure Databricks Activity in data pipelines.

• We also got the updated Microsoft Fabric adoption roadmap . If you plan adopting Microsoft Fabric in large organizations this part of product documentation can be very useful.
• Chris Webb (Microsoft) wrote an interesting and super useful blog post Read data from Delta Lake tables with the DeltaLake.Table M function . Read the blog post to learn how to use Power Query to read Delta Lake tables, including nested structures and historical versions of data.
• Ruixin Xu (Microsoft) shared a very cool blog post on how to use AI features prebuilt in Microsoft Fabric to enrich data with translation, key phase extraction and generative AI without the need to connect to any external services: Prebuilt Azure AI services in Fabric .
• For Power BI we got Power BI December 2023 Update packed with nice features like new styling options for column and bar charts , extended customization for data labels (e.g. show several values and differences), suggested content for Power BI add-in for PowerPoint, search and sort in Paginated Reports , and Git integration conflict resolution .

• Those of you interested in adoption of Power BI in large organizations may find the following parts of product documentation extremely useful - Power BI usage scenarios and Power BI usage scenario diagrams . See sample diagram for Enterprise BI scenario below.

• Zoe Douglas (Microsoft) blogged about new INFO DAX functions introduced in DAX query view - DAX query view introduces new INFO DAX functions . Read the blog to learn more about how to get metadata of your semantic models.

Community

• Phil Seamark (Microsoft) shared two very useful blog posts - Visualize Power BI Refresh using Semantic-link and Create charts using Vega in Microsoft Fabric Notebook (they were corelated - the technique from the second blog post was used to visualize Power BI Refresh process on a Gantt chart in the first blog post).
• Adrian Chodkowski (Microsoft MVP) published a two-part blog series on processing stream data using Event Streams in Microsoft Fabric - Processing stream data with Microsoft Fabric Event Streams (part1) and Processing stream data with Microsoft Fabric Event Streams (part2) .
• Chris Webb (Microsoft) on his blog (congrats on 19th birthday of the blog!) shared two very interesting posts - Incremental refresh on Delta tables in Power BI (remember - Delta is a standard format for tables in Fabric!) and Project Sophia: an AI-powered business research canvas (somehow, Project Sophia can be easily missed in the large number of Microsoft products, but it looks really interesting - you just provide the data and get insights produced by AI; learn more about it here: Microsoft Project Sophia – Microsoft Adoption ).
• Andy Cutler (Microsoft MVP) shared two useful blog posts related to Fabric - Exploring Fabric OneLake vs Azure Data Lake Gen2 Storage Accounts and Data Loading Options With Fabric Workspaces Part 1 of 2 – Yet Another Blog About The Medallion Architecture .
• Another super valuable blog post from Kevin Chant (Microsoft MVP) - Spreading your SQL Server wings with Microsoft Fabric Lakehouses .
• Sandeep Pawar shared two interesting blog posts - Refreshing Individual Tables and Partitions With Semantic Link (another use case for Semantic Link!) and Using FabricRestClient To Make Fabric REST API Calls .
• Marc Lelijveld (Microsoft MVP) came up with two blog posts on Microsoft Fabric - The future of customer understanding through Microsoft Fabric (which Fabric features can be useful for Customer 360 analytics) and Unveiling the Gotcha: The Hidden Consequences of Disabling Fabric in Your Organization (a heads up for Power BI/Fabric admins about options for enabling Fabric in the organization).
• Wolfgang Strasser (Microsoft MVP) shared an important blog post for EU based readers - Microsoft Fabric is part of Azure Core Services and therefore part of EU Data Boundary Services .
• Edward Oldham shared an interesting blog post Fabric Notebook Concurrency Explained . Read it to get a better understanding of error messages you may face when working with notebooks and/or Spark jobs in Fabric.
• Mimoune Djouallah (Microsoft) published two insightful blog posts - Reading Snowflake Iceberg Table using Fabric OneLake and Using Direct Query mode with Fabric DWH .
• Ed Freeman recorded two useful videos on using Medallion architecture in Fabric - Microsoft Fabric: Role of the Silver Lakehouse in the Medallion Architecture and Microsoft Fabric: Processing Bronze to Silver using Fabric Notebooks .
• Kerry Kolosko (Microsoft MVP) shared two blog posts related to Deneb custom visual in Power BI - Independent Scales with Deneb (Ring Chart) and Formatting Locale, Values and Tooltips in Deneb .
• Nikola Ilic (Microsoft MVP) published a blog post on how you can create and benefit from OneLake shortcuts to semantic models in Fabric - Rule Them ALL! Create a OneLake shortcut to SQL Server or DAX calculated table! .
• Great video from Reid Havens ????♂? and Daniel Marsh-Patrick (both Microsoft MVPs) about IBCS Styled Bullet Charts (SVG) in Power BI .
• Reid also shared another interesting video - Revisiting Common Calculation Group Patterns in Power BI! on how to deal with calculation groups using new Modeler view directly in Power BI Desktop.
• Two cool videos from Alex Rostan and Gaston Cruz (both Microsoft MVPs) - Unveiling the Power of Copilot Studio's Generative Answers! and Microsoft Fabric Mirroring: Revolutionize Data Management .
• Another useful episode of the Learn Fabric video series by Michael Carlo and Tommy Puglia (both Microsoft MVPs) - Intro to Shortcuts in Lakehouse .
• Mike and Tommy together with Seth Bauer (Microsoft MVP) also recorded an interesting live stream What is Semantic Link? .
• If you didn't have a chance to participate in December LIVE Q&A with Kim Manis and Bogdan Crivat (both Microsoft) hosted by Adam Saxton and Patrick LeBlanc (both Microsoft) I would definitely recommend watching the recording - REPLAY Microsoft Fabric / Power BI Q&A - LIVE w/ Kim Manis & Bogdan Crivat (Dec 16, 2023) . Lots of good questions answered.
• Two cool videos from Christopher Wagner, MBA, MVP (Microsoft MVP) - Bursting and Smoothing in Microsoft Fabric and Merry Christmas Gift to you - OneLake integration for Sematic Models .
• Together with Kevin Arnold (Microsoft MVP), Chris also recorded another episode of weekly Fabric Fridays live streams - Fabric Fridays: DAX Query Editor .

That's all folks! Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed December news (and all previous editions of my newsletter). While I will discontinue this newsletter, I recommend tracking the Azure Updates website , Microsoft Fabric Updates blog , Power BI blog, Azure SQL Blog and Azure AI services Blog to get actual information on what's new and latest in Microsoft Data & AI technologies. Also, I encourage you to go through all editions of this newsletter to find tons of links to community blogs and YouTube channels you may find useful to learn new things and keep up the pace with Microsoft platforms for data and analytics.

Once again, I wish you an extremely successful, healthy and peaceful year 2024. See you somewhere in the community!